7: Is one treatment better than another?
The various ways of draining fluid in a malignant pleural effusion are very different to each other. The most important thing to consider if which treatment suits an individual patient and their needs the best.
There is some important research that has compared the different treatments that is useful to know when you are thinking about these treatments.
One research study has compared how well chest drains and talc pleurodesis relieve the breathing difficulties caused by malignant pleural effusions compared to indwelling pleural catheters (IPCs).
This showed that both chest drain & talc and IPCs were equally as good as relieving the breathing difficulty from malignant pleural effusions.