Radiotherapy at the End of Life: From Retrospective Analysis to Strategies to Improve Outcomes

We found the article “Radiation Therapy in the Last Month of Life: Association With Aggressive Care at the End of Life” by Davis et al. 1 particularly interesting. We wanted to reiterate the importance of the topic broached by Davis et al. because the appropriate use of Radiotherapy (RT) at the end of life (EoL) is a crucial aspect of quality of care (QoC). It affects the use of healthcare services, the cost-effectiveness of modern RT, and, most importantly, the patient's quality of life (QoL). The literature has identified the increasing tendency to treat patients with advanced cancer up until the very EoL, referring them to palliative care (PC) services when it is all but too late, as an index of poor QoC. 2 This letter presents results from a retrospective observational study on the use of RT in the last 30 days of life that we used as a starting point in developing a new model to improve Palliative RT (PRT) outcomes.