JAMA internal medicine
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JAMA internal medicine · Jul 2014
ReviewStability of end-of-life preferences: a systematic review of the evidence.
Policies and practices that promote advance care planning and advance directive completion implicitly assume that patients' choices for end-of-life (EOL) care are stable over time, even with changes in health status. ⋯ Considerable variability among studies in the methods of preference assessment, the time between assessments, and the definitions of stability preclude meta-analytic estimates of the stability of patients' preferences and the factors influencing these preferences. Although more seriously ill patients and those who engage in advance care planning most commonly have stable preferences for future treatments, further research in real-world settings is needed to confirm the utility of advance care plans for future decision making.