Abstract Details

Palliative care aims to address the needs of patients and families affected by progressive illness through the management of medical symptoms, psychosocial issues, and spiritual concerns. In recent times, there has been an emerging interest in applying palliative care to PD given its high symptom burden and effects on quality of life. However, there is a paucity of research on the benefits of palliative care in the PD community as well as a lack of consensus on when referrals should be issued or how management should be implemented.

To inform evidence-based practice and future research by gathering and critically evaluating all the available literature investigating palliative care for Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients and their caregivers.

Here, we discuss PD symptomatology that could warrant palliative care referral, the efficacy of these strategies in the PD community, and possible management models. Multiple databases were searched using keywords: Parkinson’s disease, palliative, and hospice. Reviews, systematic reviews, and meta-analysis were excluded to avoid duplication of data.

Our search strategy yielded 235 articles, of which fourteen met inclusion criteria. Of these, only two were comparative studies using a PD only sample which found patients receiving palliative care experienced better quality of life and improved PD symptomatology. Significantly, multiple studies failed to report participants’ ethnicities, of those that reported, over 85% of their studied PD sample was Caucasian.

The existing evidence presented in this review suggests that there is great need for palliative care strategies in the PD community by both patients and caretakers. While there are few comparative studies, evidence suggests integrated palliative care would be beneficial to the PD community. More studies investigating quantitative effects of palliative care and advanced care planning as well as efficacy in a more diverse population and cost-efficiency of these management models are necessary for clinical implementation.