Prognostic indicators of 6-month mortality in elderly people with advanced dementia: A systematic review
Abstract
BACKGROUND: For end-of-life dementia patients, palliative care offers a better quality of life than continued aggressive or burdensome medical interventions. To provide the best care options to dementia sufferers, validated, reliable, sensitive, and accurate prognostic tools to identify end-of-life dementia stages are necessary. AIM: To identify accurate prognosticators of mortality in elderly advanced dementia patients consistently reported in the literature. DESIGN: Systematic literature review. DATA SOURCES: PubMed, Embase, and PsycINFO databases were searched up to September 2012. Reference lists of included studies were also searched. Inclusion criteria were studies measuring factors specifically related to 6-month outcome in patients diagnosed with dementia in any residential or health-care setting. RESULTS: Seven studies met the inclusion criteria, five of which were set in the United States and two in Israel. Methodology and prognostic outcomes varied greatly between the studies. All but one study found that Functional Assessment Staging phase 7c, currently widely used to assess hospice admission eligibility in the United States, was not a reliable predictor of 6-month mortality. The most common prognostic variables identified related to nutrition/nourishment, or eating habits, followed by increased risk on dementia severity scales and comorbidities. CONCLUSIONS: Although the majority of studies agreed that the Functional Assessment Staging 7c criterion was not a reliable predictor of 6-month mortality, we found a lack of prognosticator concordance across the literature. Further studies are essential to identify reliable, sensitive, and specific prognosticators, which can be applied to the clinical setting and allow increased availability of palliative care to dementia patients.
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BibTeX
@article{brown2026prognostic,
title = {{Prognostic indicators of 6-month mortality in elderly people with advanced dementia: A systematic review}},
author = {Meghan A Brown and Elizabeth L Sampson and Louise Jones and Anna M Barron},
journal = {Palliative Medicine},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.1177/0269216312465649},
url = {https://hal.science/hal-05777676v1},
note = {CC BY-NC},
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
TI - Prognostic indicators of 6-month mortality in elderly people with advanced dementia: A systematic review
AU - Meghan A Brown
AU - Elizabeth L Sampson
AU - Louise Jones
AU - Anna M Barron
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/05
JO - Palliative Medicine
DO - 10.1177/0269216312465649
UR - https://hal.science/hal-05777676v1
AB - BACKGROUND: For end-of-life dementia patients, palliative care offers a better quality of life than continued aggressive or burdensome medical interventions. To provide the best care options to dementia sufferers, validated, reliable, sensitive, and accurate prognostic tools to identify end-of-life dementia stages are necessary. AIM: To identify accurate prognosticators of mortality in elderly advanced dementia patients consistently reported in the literature. DESIGN: Systematic literature review. DATA SOURCES: PubMed, Embase, and PsycINFO databases were searched up to September 2012. Reference lists of included studies were also searched. Inclusion criteria were studies measuring factors specifically related to 6-month outcome in patients diagnosed with dementia in any residential or health-care setting. RESULTS: Seven studies met the inclusion criteria, five of which were set in the United States and two in Israel. Methodology and prognostic outcomes varied greatly between the studies. All but one study found that Functional Assessment Staging phase 7c, currently widely used to assess hospice admission eligibility in the United States, was not a reliable predictor of 6-month mortality. The most common prognostic variables identified related to nutrition/nourishment, or eating habits, followed by increased risk on dementia severity scales and comorbidities. CONCLUSIONS: Although the majority of studies agreed that the Functional Assessment Staging 7c criterion was not a reliable predictor of 6-month mortality, we found a lack of prognosticator concordance across the literature. Further studies are essential to identify reliable, sensitive, and specific prognosticators, which can be applied to the clinical setting and allow increased availability of palliative care to dementia patients.
SN - 0269-2163
SN - 1477-030X
ER -