Analysis of Survival in 273 Terminally Ill Cancer Patients Treated with Traditional Oriental Therapies

Objective : Recently, an increasing portion of cancer patients use various therapies of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) including traditional oriental medicine, which is believed to improve the consequence of cancer according to clinical experience and laboratory data. But the clinical-based systemic statistic validity of these therapies is lacking, so this study was aimed to validate the traditional oriental therapies (TOT) for terminally ill cancer patients. Patients and methods : This retrospective study was performed on 273 patients who were diagnosed with terminally ill cancer in Korea and treated with TOT in the oriental hospital of Daejeon University, from March 1997 to June 2003. We examined the median duration of the terminal period and the correlations between 9 factors and survival of terminally ill cancer patients. Results : During the study period, we could confirm 142 patients' death (52.01%) in 273 subjects. The median length of survival in terminally ill cancer patients was 16 weeks (95%CI 14.0∼20.0) and 40.15% (95%CI 40.07∼40.22) of patients had survived more than 24 weeks. According to Cox's proportional hazard model including gender, age, conventional therapies (chemotherapy, radiotherapy and surgery), performance status and clinical symptoms as independent variables, history of conventional therapies (RR 0.581, 95%CI 0.381∼0.885), higher performance status (RR 1,855, 95%CI 1.454∼2.366) and absence of ascites and pleural effusion (RR 1.631, 95%CI 1.047∼2.538) showed independent prognostic value of survival. Conclusion : Our findings suggest that TOT offer potential benefits for cancer patients at the terminal stage.