Could advanced cancer patients delay their death until a given event? If several studies have already supported the existence of a “holiday effect” in terminally ill patients, a New York oncologist has sought to confirm this phenomenon, putting forward the hypothesis “that there might be a time trend when cancer patients try to delay death until family arrives on weekends or holidays pass”.
With his team, Kanan Shah recorded the day of death of more than ten million American cancer patients over a period between 2000 and 2017. “Each year, death rates increased gradually from Monday to Thursday, peaked on Friday and Saturday and decreased on Sunday“, indicates thestudy published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. Deaths would also increase after the holidays, especially the Christmas holidays.
“The terminally ill manage to hold on, have a start”
And this intriguing phenomenon actually has a pretty logical explanation: “In fact, these terminally ill people manage to hold on, have a start. They want to see their loved ones, their family one last time, before they die. But their relatives work during the week, so they come to the hospital as soon as they can, Thursday evening, Friday, Saturday. At that moment, they say goodbye… and right after, the patients let go psychologically, and their bodies too. There is a spike in deaths. It’s the same after the Christmas holidays“, details the oncologist.
This study highlights in particular the importance of improving end-of-life care so as not to traumatize them, and to better support them, even in the absence of their loved ones.
Source :
- Cancer doesn’t know what day of the week it is: temporal trends in day of death, 2000-2017, Journal of Clinical OncologyJune 2022
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