Pneumonia in Nursing Home Patients With Advanced Dementia: Decisions, Intravenous Rehydration Therapy, and Discomfort

Background:Comfort may be an appropriate goal in advanced dementia. Longitudinal studies on physician decision-making and discomfort assessed by direct observation are rare, and intravenous rehydration therapy is controversial.Methods:To assess treatment decisions and discomfort in patients with advanced dementia and pneumonia and to compare by intravenous rehydration therapy, we used data from the observational multicenter Italian End of Life Observatory–Prospective Study On DEmentia patients Care. We analyzed 109 episodes of pneumonia, which involved decisions in 77 nursing home patients with Functional Assessment Staging Tool stage 7. We assessed decisions, decision-making, and treatments every fortnight. Trained observers assessed discomfort with the Discomfort Scale–Dementia Alzheimer Type (DS-DAT).Results:Most decisions referred to treatment with antibiotics (90%; 98 of 109) and intravenous rehydration therapy (53%; 58 of 109), but hospitalization was rare (1%). Selecting decisions with antibiotics,...