Stability over time in the preferences of older persons for life-sustaining treatment.

Objective: To measure the stability of life-sustaining treatment preferences amongst older people and analyse the factors that influence stability.

Design: Longitudinal cohort study.

Setting: Primary care centres, Granada (Spain).

Advance directives and proxies' predictions about patients' treatment preferences.

The accuracy of proxies when they interpret advance directives or apply substituted decision-making criteria has been called into question. It therefore became important to know if the Andalusian Advance Directive Form (AADF) can help to increase the accuracy of proxies' predictions. The aim of this research was to compare the effect of the AADF on the accuracy of proxies' predictions about patients' preferences with that gained from informative and deliberative sessions about end-of-life decision making.