DAHR Research Associates publishes palliative care and patient awareness papers

Dr Angelos Kassianos, an RA in the

ucl.ac.uk/dahr/about-dahr" target="_blank"> Department of Applied Health Research, has recently had two co-authored papers published, one in Supportive Care in Cancer and one in BMJ Open. The former, a meta-analysis and systematic review, suggests that cancer palliative care delivered by a specialized care team can positively impact patients' health-related quality of life. Sustainable benefits are also demonstrated. On the other hand, the review also suggests that methodological problems of available studies like high attrition rates, low precision, low power, and poor description of intervention and control procedures call for higher-quality studies to be designed, funded and published.

Kassianos, A.P., Ioannou, M., Koutsantoni, M. and Charalambous, H., 2017. The impact of specialized palliative care on cancer patients' health-related quality of life: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Supportive Care in Cancer, pp.1-19 doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00520-017-3895-1

The BMJ Open paper outlines the development of a tool to assess how an NHS Health Check affects patients' awareness of their cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk. The questionnaire developed has satisfactory reliability and validity and consists of four dimensions: Knowledge of CVD Risk and Prevention, Perceived Risk of Heart Attack/Stroke, Perceived Benefits and Intention to Change Behaviour and Healthy Eating Intentions. Woringer, M., Nielsen, J.J., Zibarras, L., Evason, J., Kassianos, A.P., Harris, M., Majeed, A. and Soljak, M., 2017.

Development of a questionnaire to evaluate patients' awareness of cardiovascular disease risk in England's National Health Service Health Check preventive cardiovascular programme. BMJ Open, 7(9), p.e014413

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