Download ESPEN - Home Artificial Nutrition Working Group

ESPEN - Home Artificial Nutrition Working Group
Prato and Copehagen, 15th May 2007
A MULTICENTER PROSPECTIVE OBSERVATIONAL STUDY ON PREDICTABILITY OF SURVIVAL OF
ADVANCED CANCER PATIENTS ON HOME PARENTERAL NUTRITION (HPN)
Dear Investigator
On behalf of the ESPEN Home Artificial Working group we kindly invite you to participate in a prospective
observational study on home parenteral nutrition (HPN) in patients with cancer. Centres from across Europe and possibly some overseas centres are invited to participate.
It is well-known that nutritional support (enteral or parenteral) may be useful to malnourished or hypophagic
patients with a poor tolerance to aggressive oncologic treatment, but only a limited percentage of advanced
(incurable) cancer patients, who receive HPN as a unique treatment, will benefit with respect to the duration
of survival.
Nevertheless, in many European series (single institutions or national registers) incurable malignancy is the
most frequently reported indication for HPN. The advantages of this treatment are not obvious for the patient, and it is important to identify the patients with incurable cancer that will benefit the most from treatment with HPN.
The main purpose of this prospective observational study is to be able to predict more accurately, on the
basis of simple data at the beginning of HPN, the survival of patients with an active cancer, in order to more
precisely formulate the recommendations for such treatment and possibly to restrict the indications for HPN
to the population that presumably will benefit.
The study is not demanding regarding resources of your department, since only rather simple data are required in order to be able to fulfil the purpose of the study. For details kindly see enclosures.
If you are not in a position to participate in this study do not hesitate to let us know. We are pleased to receive suggestions about centres that could be involved in the study. It is very important to recruit centres in
order to include the number of patients that we aim at. Also, if you have any questions regarding the protocol we shall be pleased to try and sort it out.
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The study will start by June 2007. Please observe that in some centres/countries the approval of ethical
committee may be required.
The data will be presented at the ESPEN conference and other international and national meetings and as
a full publication. Your contribution will be fully acknowledged.
Thank you for your support.
Kind regards
Federico BOZZETTI, Principal investigator
Dept Surgery
Hospital of Prato
Prato (Italy)
mail: [email protected]
Michael STAUN Chairman/secretary HANW
Department of Medical Gastroenterology
Rigshospitalet
Copenhagen (Denmark)
mail: [email protected]
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