Doctors keeping very sick babies off life support

Doctors keeping very sick babies off life support | Reuters: A study of babies in intensive care suggests that doctors are getting better at recognizing situations where infants are sure to die or have severe brain damage -- and are often holding back on life support when that's the case.

The findings 'reflect increasing awareness by the medical community of the need to limit interventions of minimal or very questionable benefit, and particularly if those interventions potentially include significant pain or suffering to the patient,' said Dr. Renee Boss, a neonatologist at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, who wasn't part of the new research. Over the past 30 years, Boss said, doctors have gotten better at keeping very premature babies and babies with severe birth defects alive.

But more recently, those survival rates have flattened out -- possibly because 'the treatments that we have now simply have reached their maximum potential for increasing survival,' Boss told Reuters Health, forcing doctors and families to address cases where survival, or survival with a positive outlook, doesn't seem likely.

About 60 percent of infants died when doctors took them off ventilators or otherwise stopped giving life support, and the remaining 20 percent occurred when medical staff withheld life-prolonging treatment altogether.

Deaths that happened when doctors decided not to start giving treatment became more common over the course of the study, rising by about one percent each year. That was especially true in the very premature group, according to findings published in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

Dr. William Meadow, a neonatologist at the University of Chicago Medical Center, pointed out that these patterns might look different at another intensive care unit. For example, at his hospital, most very sick babies who are in "stable" condition -- meaning they aren't obviously dying while on life support, but might have extensive brain damage -- don't have that care taken away. He said that's because poor, religious parents at his hospital seem to be more okay with the idea that their child might survive, though remain very impaired.