News Briefs – MAY 2023
by Brandon Glick
Considering Palliative Care in Refugee Camps
A recent article published in PLOS Global Public Health discusses at length the access to, and increasing importance of, palliative care in refugee camps. This study drew upon roughly 100 interviews held in refugee camps in Rwanda and Jordan, and in Ebola treatment centers in Guinea with staff of humanitarian and health care agencies. While interviews concluded that many consider palliative care to be unneeded or unfeasible in “hotspot” areas of crises, the authors of the article still push adamantly for care aimed at reducing the suffering and increasing the quality of life of people living in refugee camps.
In trying to determine the viability and potential for success at administering and implementing palliative care in these areas, the authors highlight four primary concerns: “justification and integration of palliative care into humanitarian response, contextualizing palliative care approaches to crisis settings, the importance of being attentive to the ‘situatedness of dying,’ and the need for retaining a holistic approach to care.” The article concludes with a call to action, encouraging crisis response agencies to implement palliative care, as it is fundamentally consistent with humanitarian values and practice.
Regular Meditation Practice Can Benefit Chronic Pain
The efficacy of “third-wave” psychotherapies (e.g., meditation and emotion-based treatments) in treating patients with chronic pain conditions is discussed in a recent study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. A meta-analysis of 31 published studies, this systematic review scrupulously examines the effects of these treatment types in relation to the frequency and duration the patients invest into them. In analyzing the data, the study reveals that most patients universally invested “moderate frequency” (i.e., three to five days a week) in different home meditation practices, but the actual time invested in each session was exceptionally volatile, both from patient-to-patient and session-to-session for individual patients.
The report suggests a high correlation between positive health outcomes (i.e., lesser or limited pain) and the amount of time invested in meditation practices, though it notes that even patients who report significantly less pain in chronic areas are still subject to wildly varying amounts of time invested on a per-session basis. Some of the most popular forms of third-wave psychotherapy treatment, including Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, feature some of the lowest levels of adherence to recommended investment time (~40% of the recommended time); this information, tied together with the effectiveness of the treatments in general, leads the review to conclude that new modifications of home practice meditation must be created in order to encourage patients with chronic pain to participate for the full allotments of time.
More Research Needed on Dementia in Latin American and Caribbean Countries
A survey posed and analyzed by the Alzheimer’s Association breaks down the startling lack of knowledge about dementia biomarkers in Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries. The study finds that “neuroimaging is the most used biomarker [in LAC countries] (73%), followed by genetic studies (40%), peripheral fluids biomarkers (31%), and cerebrospinal fluid biomarkers (29%),” though the authors are careful to note that these numbers may be a product of what is available to health care professionals rather than an actual correlation between usage and efficacy.
A severe lack of funding to help implement biomarker tools in appropriate settings and insufficient training for health care professionals in the region are barriers to understanding dementia in these countries. Despite this, there appears to be a tremendous opportunity to not only bring LAC countries up to speed in dementia biomarker research, but also to use the region to further advance the scientific consensus on the topic. The authors conclude with a five-step plan that they propose will help modernize LAC countries in dementia biomarker research and implementation.