A UCLA/RAND research team led by Thanh Huynh wanted to better quantify the prevalence and cost of physician-perceived futile treatment in adult critical care.
In an article published (and available for free) online today in JAMA Internal Medicine, the authors write that intensivists report the care they were delivering was futile 11% of the time and probably futile in another 8.6% of the time.
The most common reason why intensivists perceived treatment as futile was that the burdens of aggressive therapy grossly outweighed its potential benefit. Other reasons included:
- Treatment could never achieve the patient’s goals
- Death was imminent
- Patient would never be able to survive outside of an ICU
- Patient was permanently unconscious
Bob Truog and Doug White published an invited commentary offering some cautions about defining futility and about the study's conclusions about cost savings.
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