Lesser Interventions Likely If Proxies Predict End of Life

Proxies are less likely to use medical interventions if they gauge a shorten length of life, according to a recent study.

Proxies have been quite accurate in predicting the length of life left for someone with advanced dementia, according to a new research from Hebrew SeniorLife's Institute for Aging Research (IFAR).

Secondly, when proxies have judged that //their loved one has less than 6 months to live they are more likely to have discussed goals of care with the health care team, and less likely to agree to burdensome interventions.

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‘If proxies have judged that a patient has very little time to live, they are less likely to agree to burdensome medical interventions.’

The results of this study were published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association Internal Medicine (JAMA IM) .

To discover these findings, researchers combined data from two studies which prospectively followed nursing home residents with advanced dementia and their proxies in the Boston area for 12 months. During quarterly telephone interviews, proxies stated whether they believed the resident they represented would live less than one month, 1-6 months, 7-12 months, or more than 12 months.

Researchers then examined the association between the proxies' prognostic estimates and the receipt of burdensome treatments by the residents, such as hospital transfers, intravenoustherapy, tube-feeding, blood draws, and insertions of catheters into the bladder.

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They found that residents whose proxies believed they would die within 6 months, received fewer of these burdensome treatments compared to residents whose proxies thought they would live longer.

Lead author, Andrea Loizeau MSc, a visiting doctoral student at IFAR from the Univeristy of Zurich, explains, "Proxies are reasonably good at estimating when nursing home residents with advanced dementia will die and their prognostic perceptions may influence the type of care the resident receives."

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Source-Eurekalert

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