Withholding or Withdrawing of Life-sustaining Therapy in Great East French Region Intensive Care Units: a 1-month Survey

Intensive care has known an important scientists progress for the last twenty years, allowing healing more and more severe patients. Throughout the time, population has been getting old more and more, making patients affected by several comorbidities.

As any medical specialty, intensive care has been confronted to these both evolutions. Thus ethical issues subsist for many years concerning rationality of cares intensity given to the patients. Depending on their age, and their comorbidities. Indeed, if cares are still possibles, disponibles and dispensables, they are not necessarily faithful.

Withholding or withdrawing of life-sustaining therapy represents a non-negligible part of deaths in intensive care units in France. In the literature, these decisions concern 8,5% to 14% of patients residents in an intensive care unit in France, with variations depending on age, so can reach 20% on patients aged more than 80 years old.

Among recent studies concerning withholding or withdrawing of life-sustaining therapy in French intensive care units, LATAREA is one of the first biggest (148 intensive care units, 7488 patients). It gives us important information about the subject. However, this study is an old one (1997), previous to Clayes-Leonetti law promulgation, which has governed ending life patients' rights since 2016. In LATAREA study, 11% of patients had measures of withholding or withdrawing of life-sustaining therapy; and mortality in intensive care units among these patients was at 78%. WLST conditions were described briefly.

A study from EPILAT group, even if more recent (2015), gives us interesting data too, but it is an ancillary study with recruitment on only 616 intensive care beds, which represented 10% of intensive care beds at the time approximately. In this study, 14% of the patients were undergoing withholding or withdrawing of life-sustaining therapy. Among notable data, we can read that an external opinion was given in less than 50% of the cases, and that less than 2% of the patients had named somebody as one's support person or had written advanced directives. It also showed that WLST percentage crossed from 8% to 30% of admissions depending on intensive care units participating.