Abstract
Introduction: Adequate nutritional therapy is often a missing factor in the treatment of patients receiving end-of-life palliative care. The American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Care defined palliative care as comprehensive and specialized care. The main concerns are nutritional, pain, and symptom management, information sharing and advance care planning, psychosocial and spiritual support, and care coordination. Objective: It was to list the main outcomes of clinical studies and guidelines on enteral/parenteral nutritional therapy and palliative care in critically ill patients. Methods: The systematic review rules of the PRISMA Platform were followed. The search was carried out from June to August 2024 in the Scopus, PubMed, Science Direct, Scielo, and Google Scholar databases. The quality of the studies was based on the GRADE instrument and the risk of bias was analyzed according to the Cochrane instrument. Results and Conclusion: A total of 93 articles were found. A total of 44 articles were evaluated in full and 16 were included and developed in the present systematic review study. Considering the Cochrane tool for risk of bias, the overall assessment resulted in 13 studies with a high risk of bias and 27 studies that did not meet GRADE and AMSTAR-2. Most studies showed homogeneity in their results, with X2=85.9%>50%. It was concluded that palliative nutritional care plans for critically ill patients should be managed by a nutritionist together with patients and family members. The benefits and risks of artificial nutrition and hydration should be discussed with the patient and/or caregiver when palliative care is initiated. The main goal of palliative care is to preserve the patient's quality of life. This includes defending freedom of choice and allowing the patient to determine their level of nutritional intervention. The results suggest that providing nutritional support ( 12 g of protein, 300 kcal) daily prevents the loss of active tissue mass in palliative cancer patients. Based on these results, we recommend the inclusion of this simple nutritional support to prevent malnutrition in cancer patients in palliative care. Furthermore, severe malnutrition is a predictor of reduced survival in patients with advanced gastrointestinal cancer. Information on nutritional status should be considered to individualize the palliative care plan for these patients and, therefore, improve their quality of life. Using the modified Glasgow Prognostic Score to identify the existence and severity of cancer cachexia has the potential to aid clinical decision-making regarding the indication of enteral nutrition in patients with incurable cancer receiving palliative care.