Stability of end-of-life preferences: a systematic review of the evidence.

ABSTRACT:

Importance

Policies and practices that promote advance care planning and advance directive completion implicitly assume that patients' choices for end-of-life (EOL) care are stable over time, even with changes in health status.

Objective

To systematically evaluate the evidence on the stability of EOL preferences over time and with changes in health status.

Evidence review

We searched for longitudinal studies of patients' preferences for EOL care in PubMed, EMBASE, and using citation review. Studies restricted to preferences regarding the place of care at the EOL were excluded.

Findings

A total of 296 articles were assessed for eligibility, and 59 met inclusion criteria. Twenty-four articles had sufficient data to extract or calculate the percentage of individua

SUBMITTER: Auriemma CL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8243894 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature