Individual prognostic assessment in the intensive care unit: can therapeutic persistence be distinguished from therapeutic obstinacy?

Objectives: Availability of state-of-the-art technology at intensive care units has often turned into a tool aggravating suffering by prolonging the end-of-life process. Distinguishing therapeutic persistence from therapeutic obstinacy has become a great challenge for present-day medicine. The aim of this study was to assess the benefit-harm relation in the use of life-sustaining therapies by means of an evolutionary system of individual prognostic assessment.

[Medical futility and respiratory failure: a prospective cohort study].

Background And Objectives: Currently, the reformulation of intensive care goals, often shifting from the search for a cure to offering comfort, has become more and more necessary. The intensivist is frequently confronted with the decision to suspend or not offer a specific therapy, despite its availability. The objective of this study was to estimate the developing risk of probability of death for individual ICU patients with respiratory failure, identify which life-sustaining therapies were administered, time of internment and outcome.