Malignant bowel obstruction, a complication of certain advanced cancers, causes severe symptoms which profoundly affect quality of life. Clinical management remains complex, and outcome assessment is inconsistent.
To identify outcomes evaluating palliative treatment for inoperable malignant bowel obstruction, as part of a four-phase study developing a core outcome set.
The review is reported in accordance with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA); PROSPERO (ID: CRD42019150648). Eligible studies included at least one subgroup with obstruction below the ligament of Treitz undergoing palliative treatment for inoperable malignant bowel obstruction. Study quality was not assessed because the review does not evaluate efficacy.
Medline, Embase, the Cochrane Database, CINAHL, PSYCinfo Caresearch, Open Grey and BASE were searched for trials and observational studies in October 2021.
A total of 4769 studies were screened, 290 full texts retrieved and 80 (13,898 participants) included in a narrative synthesis; 343 outcomes were extracted verbatim and pooled into 90 unique terms across six domains: physiological, nutrition, life impact, resource use, mortality and survival. Prevalent outcomes included adverse events (78% of studies), survival (54%), symptom control (39%) and mortality (31%). Key individual symptoms assessed were vomiting (41% of studies), nausea (34%) and pain (33%); 19% of studies assessed quality of life.
See how this article has been cited at scite.ai
scite shows how a scientific paper has been cited by providing the context of the citation, a classification describing whether it supports, mentions, or contrasts the cited claim, and a label indicating in which section the citation was made.