The 2024 update to the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s (ASCO) clinical practice guidelines place renewed emphasis on palliative care.
The guidelines are updated periodically by a multidisciplinary team, including a patient representative and experts in medical and radiation oncology, hematology and palliative care. For the 2024 revisions, this panel reviewed 52 randomized controlled trials that evaluated outcomes among cancer patients who received palliative care, ASCO reported.
“This is a pivotal time,” the panel’s co-chair Betty Ferrell of City of Hope Cancer Care told the ASCO Post. “This guideline is a call to action for everyone to think about how they are integrating palliative care for all patients with cancer. There are great advances in cancer care, but none of these will be fully effective unless we fully integrate palliative care.”
Though historically the ASCO guidelines have acknowledged the critical importance of palliative care for cancer patients, the revisions reinforce that position. Specifically, the guidelines call for early palliative care interventions. However, they do not give a specific timeframe for those interventions following diagnosis, according to the ASCO Post.
Recent estimates project that more than 2 million people in the United States will receive a new cancer diagnosis this year, leading to an expected 611,720 deaths. In 2019, the national economic burden associated with cancer reached in excess of $21 billion, according to the National Cancer Institute.
The ASCO guidelines also indicated a need for greater palliative care involvement in caring for patients with hematological cancers. Palliative care is often underutilized among that population, ASCO indicated. Patients who participate in early-phase clinical trials also need greater access to palliative care, according to ASCO.
“These updated guidelines stress that we need to do better for these patients,” Ferrell said. “The panel recognized that data are limited in this population, but there’s no question that patients with hematologic malignancies have a lot of symptoms and quality-of-life concerns.”
