Palliative care consultation in the last week of life and associated factors: a cross-sectional general population study.

Background: Knowledge of access to palliative care services, such as palliative care consultation teams, is crucial to identify areas of improvement for policy and practice. Research on general populations spanning all disease groups and multiple healthcare contexts is needed.

Objective: The objective was to investigate the sociodemographic, disease- and care-related, and care structure-related factors associated with palliative care consultations for adult patients in the last week of life.

Validating the Influences of Methodological Decisions on Assessing the Spatiotemporal Stability of Speech Movement Sequences Using Children's Speech Data.

Purpose: Prior research introduced quantifiable effects of three methodological parameters (number of repetitions, stimulus length, and parsing error) on the spatiotemporal index (STI) using simulated data. Critically, these parameters often vary across studies. In this study, we validate these effects, which were previously only demonstrated via simulation, using children's speech data.

Systemic Therapy Improvements Will Render Locoregional Treatments Obsolete for Patients with Cancer with Liver Metastases.

Hepatic metastases are a major cause of morbidity and mortality for patients with cancer. Apart from curative resection, which offers patients the potential for long-term survival, an array of locoregional therapies, with limited evidence of improving survival, are used to treat them. The authors use examples from the realm of gastrointestinal cancer, largely focusing on the experience of patients with neuroendocrine cancer, hepatobiliary cancer, and colorectal cancer, to suggest that current systemic therapies offer, at minimum, similar survival outcomes for patients compared with these locoregional approaches.

Omission of 5-Fluorouracil Bolus From Multidrug Regimens for Advanced Gastrointestinal Cancers: A Multicenter Cohort Study.

Background: 5-Fluorouracil (5-FU) is a major component of gastrointestinal cancer treatments. In multidrug regimens such as FOLFOX, FOLFIRI, and FOLFIRINOX, 5-FU is commonly administered as a bolus followed by an infusion. However, the pharmacologic rationale for incorporating the 5-FU bolus in these regimens is unclear, and there are other effective regimens for gastrointestinal cancers that do not include the bolus.