Journal of critical care
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Journal of critical care · Dec 2014
The Durban World Congress Ethics Round Table II: Withholding or withdrawing of treatment in elderly patients admitted to the intensive care unit.
Life-sustaining treatment (LST) limitation for elderly patients is highly controversial. In that context, it is useful to evaluate the attitudes to LST in the elderly among experienced intensive care unit (ICU) physicians with different backgrounds and cultures. ⋯ There is a consensus among ICU physicians that age cannot be the sole criterion on which health care decisions should be made. In that perspective, it is important to provide data showing that outcome differences between elderly and nonelderly patients are partly related to decisions to forgo LSTs.