A new study released today, undertaken in Germany, has revealed that cancer doctors often have a tough time estimating the life span of their terminal cancer patients and as a result, this many a times leads to inappropriate use of palliative treatments during the final days of life.

"The life span of cancer patients is overestimated by the doctors in the vast majority of cases. Too optimistic estimates are dangerous for patients as they tempt doctors to apply prolonged irradiation schedules", said Study Leader Dr. Stephan Gripp, of University Hospital Dusseldorf.

He also added that many of the schedules being undertaken are often left unfinished as well because the patients either end up opting out of the treatment or dying.

For all those patients who are in the advanced or final stages of cancer, doctor often decide to administer small doses of palliative radiation to help ease the immense pain caused by cancer and other similar symptoms of the condition. But this is not without its set of side effects and for many, it ends up doing more harm than good.

Details of the study, which involved analysis of 216 terminal cancer patients , have been published in the journal Cancer. Out of these patients, who had been referred to radiation between December 2003 and July 2004, 33 ended up dying with 30 days of administration of the treatment and almost 91% of them spent over 60% of their remaining life span under radiation.