Palliative care includes much more than hospice services, lead author of the new position statement Lynne P. Taylor, MD, University of Washington, Seattle, and a fellow of the AAN, said in a press release.
“Neurologists provide palliative care to people living with life-altering neurologic illnesses not just at the end of life but throughout the course of a disease, improving their lives with symptom control,” Dr. Taylor added.
The position paper, developed by a joint committee of the AAN, American Neurological Association, and Child Neurology Society, was published online March 8 in Neurology.
Guidance across the lifespan
The new paper, an update of previous position statements, includes palliative care guidance for different neurologic disorders across the lifespan. For example, neuropalliative care for neonates deserves “extra consideration,” because one-third of pediatric deaths occur during the neonatal period, most often in the neonatal intensive care unit, and after withdrawal of life-sustaining interventions, the authors note.
For older children, neuropalliative care consultation benefits families trying to maximize the quality of the remainder of their child’s life. Decisionmaking must consider the child’s cognitive abilities, the diagnosis, the perceived level of suffering, parental values, and the family’s understanding of the prognosis, the authors note.
They note that discussions about prognosis are often difficult but critical. Previous research “supports that patients desire prognostic information even when prognosis is uncertain and appreciate when their physicians disclose the presence of that uncertainty,” the authors note.
Also important is engaging in shared decisionmaking with patients and families. “This approach requires the physician to elicit a patient’s goals, make recommendations based on whether medical treatments are likely to achieve those goals, and work with patients and families to finalize a treatment plan,” according to the new guidance.
Ethical considerations
When treatments are physiologically futile, clinicians need to explain why interventions that may cause harm and have no benefit are not offered.
The authors cite cardiopulmonary resuscitation in the setting of cardiac arrest from irreversible herniation as an example of futility in the context of neurologic disease.
When life-prolonging care is no longer an option, clinicians have an obligation to shift the focus of care to preserving quality of life and comfort as much as possible, they add.
Hospices, which provide comfort-focused medical care as well as psychosocial and spiritual support, are reserved for patients believed to be in the last 6 months of their life if their disease follows the expected course.
The investigators also broached ethical considerations for individual neurologic conditions. Concerns for disorders of consciousness include misdiagnosis or inaccurate prognostication, and serial examinations are needed to re-evaluate levels of cognition, psychological state, decisionmaking capacity, and disease trajectory.
In patients with locked-in syndrome, a state of irreversible paralysis, often with respiratory and vocal paralysis, consciousness may range from a chronic minimally conscious state to intact cognition.
Without careful examination, patients with preserved consciousness may be mistaken as having a disorder of consciousness and risk their decisional capacity being ignored, the researchers note.
These patients may need assistance from speech pathologists to identify techniques to enhance communication, such as careful “yes/no” questioning, communication boards, or advanced eye-gaze technology, they add.