The Association between Individual Income and Aggressive End-of-Life Treatment in Older Cancer Decedents in Taiwan

Chih-Yuan Huang, Yeh-Ting Hung, Chun-Ming Chang, Shiun-Yang Juang and Ching-Chih Lee

PLOS ONE, 2015, vol. 10, issue 1, 1-13

Abstract: Objectives: To examine the association of individual income and end of life (EOL) care in older cancer decedents in Taiwan. Design: Retrospective cohort study. Setting: National Health Insurance Research Database (NHIRD) in Taiwan. Participants: 28,978 decedents >65 years were diagnosed with cancer and died during 2009-2011 in Taiwan. Of these decedents, 10941, 16535, and 1502 were categorized by individual income as having low, moderate, and high SES, respectively. Main outcome measures: Indicators of aggressiveness of EOL care: chemotherapy use before EOL, more than one emergency department (ER) visit, more than one hospital admission, hospital length of stay >14 days, intensive care unit (ICU) admission, and dying in a hospital. Results: Low individual income was associated with more aggressive EOL treatment (estimate -0.30 for moderate income, -0.27 for high income, both p 14 days. Conclusions: Low individual income is associated with more aggressive EOL treatment in older cancer decedents. Public health providers should make available appropriate education and hospice resources to these decedents and their families, to reduce the amount of aggressive terminal care such decedents receive.

Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0116913 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 16913&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0116913

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0116913

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().