Medical Decisions Made by Surrogates for Persons with Advanced Dementia within Weeks or Months of Death.

Background: Surrogates make all medical decisions for persons with advanced dementia. This study describes the types of medical decisions that surrogates faced prior to the person's death and their perceived difficulty and satisfaction with those decisions.

Methods: Seventy-six surrogates of nursing home residents meeting hospice criteria for dementia were followed longitudinally and interviewed following the death of the person with dementia.

Predictors of mortality in nursing home residents with advanced dementia.

This analysis uses data from the Care of Nursing Home Residents with Advanced Dementia (CareAD) study to investigate which factors increase the risk of death in patients who are in the advanced stages of dementia. The hypothesis of this analysis was that specific illnesses with known high mortality would be associated with increased risk of death in the population of nursing home residents with advanced dementia, after controlling for demographic variables and disease-stage variables. Baseline data on 123 end-stage dementia nursing home residents were analyzed with a Cox proportional hazards regression.

Prevalence and treatment of neuropsychiatric symptoms in advanced dementia.

Neuropsychiatric symptoms (NPS) are common in dementia, although little is known about their prevalence and treatment near the end of life. This study used a retrospective review of the medical records of 123 hospice-eligible nursing home residents with advanced dementia to investigate the prevalence of NPS and NPS-targeted pharmacological and non-pharmacological treatments. The most prevalent NPS were agitation or aggression (50.