Palliative care in cardiovascular medicine.

Early palliative care for adults with advanced cardiovascular disease improves symptom control and quality of life, and is linked to less psychological distress and reduced high-intensity, low-value end-of-life care.

• Why it matters: As survival improves, many people live longer with high symptom burden, functional decline, and complex decisions, creating a need to better align care with patient values.
• What they did: This state-of-the-art review synthesizes conceptual foundations, referral triggers, and delivery models, covering heart failure, valvular disease, pulmonary hypertension, arrhythmias, and congenital heart disease, and proposes a pragmatic integration algorithm.
• The result: It summarizes evidence supporting early PC benefits and highlights implementation gaps beyond heart failure, including across populations with cardiac devices and across diverse cultural and health systems.

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