Dementia, survival rates, and nursing home admissions

For clinicians it is an important and demanding task to inform patients with dementia and their relatives about the prognosis. As with malignant diseases, discussing remaining life expectancy and time to death is a delicate matter. But it is even more challenging to provide information about the timeline for dependency and need for nursing home care because many factors are involved, not only the type of dementia, sex, and age of patients, but also comorbidities, lifestyle, and socioeconomic and cultural factors. Some patients seek all available information about their prognosis, whereas others prefer to know less, and the emotional response to information on the dementia diagnosis and prognosis varies substantially, from catastrophic to pragmatic. Additionally, a substantial discrepancy can exist between what patients and their relatives want in terms of information.

The previous reviews on dementia related survival12 and nursing home admission were published more than a decade ago,3 so the linked study by Brück and colleagues (doi: …