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How Do Surrogates Make Treatment Decisions for Patients with Dementia? An Experimental Survey Study
National Bureau of Economic Research
Feb 23, 2024
Despite the growing need for surrogate decision-making for older adults, little is known about how surrogates make decisions and whether advance directives would change decision-making. In a national survey, Lauren Hersch Nicholas, PhD, and co-authors found participants were more likely to indicate that surrogates should choose comfort care when a hospitalized older adult has dementia, even when the patient’s advance directives indicated s/he would prefer life-extending treatments.
Conversely, for hypothetical patients without dementia, respondents are more likely to state that the surrogate should choose life-extending treatments even when the patient had indicated s/he would want comfort care. Their findings suggest that older adults should choose proxy decision-makers with similar preferences to their own to increase preference-concordant surrogate decisions.
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