Related Experiment Video
Updated: Aug 12, 2025

Author Spotlight: Assessing Surgical Frailty with Point-of-Care Ultrasound of Quadriceps Muscles
Published on: July 26, 2024
Risk factors for delirium in advanced cancer patients: A systematic review and meta-analysis
Yating Guo1, Yan Mu2, Tingting Wu3
1College of Nursing, Fujian University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Fujian, China.
Purpose:
To systematically collect published research in order to identify and quantify risk factors for delirium in advanced cancer patients.
Methods:
The Cochrane Library, PubMed, Proquest, CINAHL, Web of Science, Ovid MEDLINE, Embase, Scopus, Chinese Wanfang Data, Chinese Periodical Full-text Database (VIP), Chinese Biomedical Literature Database (CBM), and Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) were systematically searched for cohort or case-control studies reporting individual risk factors for delirium among advanced-stage cancer patients published prior to March 2022. The Newcastle-Ottawa Scale was used to assess the methodological quality of included studies. The pooled adjusted odds ratio (aOR) and its 95% confidence interval were calculated using the RevMan 5.4 software package.
Results:
A total of 15 studies with data from 3106 advanced cancer patients were included in our analysis. Nine studies were high-quality and six were of moderate quality. Pooled analyses revealed that 11 risk factors were statistically significant. High-intensity risk factors included sleep disturbance, infection, cachexia and the Palliative Prognostic Index; medium-intensity risk factors included male sex, renal failure, dehydration and drowsiness; low-intensity risk factors included age, total bilirubin and opioid use. Antibiotic use was found to have been a protective factor.
Conclusions:
We identified 12 independent risk factors that were significantly associated with delirium in advanced cancer patients and provide an evidence-based foundation to implement appropriate preventive strategies.
Related Concept Videos
Psychoneuroimmunology: Diabetes and Cancer
Dementia
The progression of dementia is generally gradual....
Esophageal Varices-II: Clinical Features and Management
In the initial assessment, a thorough review of the patient's medical history is vital to identify risk factors such as liver disease, alcohol...
Nursing Ethical Principles II
Consider the following scenario, which illustrates how these principles are applied in the care of Mr. John, a fifty-year-old teacher diagnosed with metastatic liver cancer.
Initially, Mr. John's...
Alzheimer's Disease: Overview
The clinical diagnosis of AD hinges on the presence of memory and other cognitive impairments. Biomarkers, such as changes in Aβ...
Acute Respiratory Failure-IV

