People with CNS cancer and their caregivers need and deserve not only innovative cancer-directed care but also high-quality person-centered care for navigating living their lives in the face of their cancer diagnosis and treatment. Palliative care aims to be an extra layer of support for people with cancer and their caregivers by focusing on what matters most to them and helping people live as well as they can for as long as they can. Palliative care is appropriate starting from time of diagnosis when many palliative care needs begin and is most beneficial when integrated earlier in the disease trajectory, yet the provision of palliative care remains underutilized in neuro-oncology. Centered on illness experience and the multidimensional composition of a person's biological, psychological, and social factors, palliative care is an approach to person-centered care focused on optimizing management of distress arising from physical, psychological, social, existential, and spiritual concerns to reduce and mitigate suffering while promoting coping, patient autonomy, choice, and access to information per the values, goals, priorities, beliefs, and culture of the patient, caregiver, and family members. Fundamental aspects of palliative care, referred to as primary palliative care, should be provided by all clinicians, with specialty palliative care clinicians augmenting as needed where available. In this article, teachable, learnable, and adaptable serious illness communication frameworks leveraged in the palliative care approach are featured in two vignettes. The use of these serious illness communication frameworks actualizes the translation of cancer science into high-quality person-centered cancer care.
Leeper et al. (2026) studied this question.