Videos Help People Plan for End of Life

TIME magazine featured a piece on study that appeared in the British Medical Journal that involved showing 65-year-olds a two-minute video of an elderly woman with dementia and asking what type of care they would like to receive if they were to develop advanced dementia. Those results were compared to subjects who only received a verbal description of the disease without the accompanying video.

Among the patients who received only the verbal narrative, 64% chose comfort care, 19% chose limited care and 14% chose life prolonging care (3% were uncertain). Among the patients who also saw the video, 86% chose comfort care, 9% chose limited care, 4% chose life prolonging care, and 1% was uncertain.

Perhaps more crucially, says the study's lead author Angelo Volandes of Massachusetts General Hospital, when participants were contacted six weeks later, only 6% of patients who saw the video had changed their preference for care, compared with 29% of those who did not see the video. People who saw the video also scored higher on health literacy tests, given by the researchers to judge knowledge of advanced dementia. "The results suggest that patients who watched the video had a better understanding of the disease and felt more secure in their decision. We felt those results were promising, as the goal for end-of-life decisions is to make sure [the patients] are informed," Volandes says.