Advance Directives and Outcomes of Surrogate Decision Making before Death

Recent discussions about health care reform have raised questions regarding the value of advance directives.

We used data from survey proxies in the Health and Retirement Study involving adults 60 years of age or older who had died between 2000 and 2006 to determine the prevalence of the need for decision making and lost decision-making capacity and to test the association between preferences documented in advance directives and outcomes of surrogate decision making.