When is medical treatment futile?

When Is Medical Care “Futile”? The Institutional Competence of the Medical Profession Regarding the Provision of Life-Sustaining Medical Care

Hepatocellular carcinoma: when is liver transplantation oncologically futile?

Selection criteria of patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) for liver transplantation (LT) have been progressively expanded since the introduction of the Milan criteria. Transplanting patients with unfavourable tumor characteristics increases the risk of tumor recurrence and impacts post-transplant survival. Although tumor number and size are the basis of widely accepted selection criter...

When will resistance be futile?

Cancer cells rapidly evolve a multitude of defense mechanisms to evade the effects of the oncologist's drug arsenal. Unfortunately, clinical strategies to overcome these lag far behind. This mismatch likely underlies our inability to implement new durable treatment strategies. Here, a new form of multidrug resistance, inducible drug glucuronidation, is discussed. This form was discovered while ...

Fertility treatment when the prognosis is very poor or futile: a committee opinion.

The Ethics Committee recommends development of evidence-based policies that are patient-centered for each in vitro fertilization (IVF) center. In most cases, the provision of futile therapies is not ethically justifiable. For those treatments with very poor success rates, clinicians must be vigilant in their presentation of risks, benefits, and alternatives. This document was reviewed in January ...

Cirrhosis and operative trauma: determining when care is futile

s from the First Annual Baylor Scott and White Surgery Research Day 318 was that maternal preeclampsia independently increases necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC) risk in newborns. Th e database of all births at our institution from 2008 to 2011 (n = 9993) was retrospectively reviewed after institutional review board approval. Multiple mother and baby variables, including maternal age, race, parity...