Introduction:
Cholangiocarcinoma (CCA) incidence in Northeastern Thailand is very high, and a major cause of mortality CCA patients typically have a poor prognosis and short-term survival rate, due to late-stage diagnosis. . Thailand is , the first Southeast Asian country to approve medicinal cannabis treatment, especially for palliative care with advanced cancer patients..
Patients and methods:
A retrospectively cohort comparative study of , survival rates among 491 newly diagnosed advanced CCA patients was carried out between September 2019 and 30 July, 2021; (404 patients in a standard palliative care pain management treatment group (ST), and 87 in a medicinal cannabis treatment group (CT). CCA Patients were recruited from 4 tertiary hospitals and 2 secondary hospitals in five provinces of Northeast Thailand. The cumulative survival rates were calculated by the Kaplan-Meier method, and independent prognostic factors were investigated using Cox regression.
Results:
For ST patients there was a total follow-up time of 790 person-months, with a , mortality rate of 48.35/ 100 person-years. For CT patients the total follow-up time was 476 person-months, with mortality rate of 10.9./ 100 person-years. The median survival time after registration at a palliative clinic was 0.83 months (95%CI: 0.71-0.95) for ST and 5.66 months (95%CI: 1.94-9.38) for CT None of the demographic factors were significantly associated with survival time for either ST or CT. Comparing ST with CT, there was a difference statistically significant in age, sex, cancer treatment and period of diagnosis with advanced CCA,HCC to registration factors (p-value<0.05)
Conclusions:
The medicinal cannabis group had an increase post CCA diagnosis survival rate.. Our findings support the importance of early access to palliative cannabis clinic before caner’s terminal and accelerating phase close to death.