[Palliative care and heart failure: some remarks about cost-effectiveness and clinical results]

Early palliative care (PC) clearly demonstrated its efficacy in patients with heart failure (HF), reducing symptom burden, mainly pain and depression, improving quality of life, and reducing the access to the health care system. However, there are not conclusive data on economic cost reduction. The reasons are related to the few patients involved in the studies dedicated to this topic, to the different clinical settings, different modalities of provision and funding of PC, and different timing of PC implementation. PC was not shown to reduce mortality nor hospital readmissions in randomized trials.The unanswered questions will be clarified only in larger studies, defining specific clinical settings, goals to achieve and standardizing the provision and funding modalities in the different countries.