ArticleHEC forum : an interdisciplinary journal on hospitals' ethical and legal issues2021
Is Left Ventricular Assist Device Deactivation Ethically Acceptable? A Study on the Euthanasia Debate.
Article in HEC forum : an interdisciplinary journal on hospitals' ethical and legal issues, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Depression and Suicidality in Patients with Left Ventricular Assist Devices and Advanced Cardiac Therapies: Mechanisms, Risk Factors, and Clinical Management.Medical sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Opening the Sacred Chamber: The Cultural and Ethical Odyssey of Cardiac Surgery.Journal of cardiovascular development and disease · 2025Review
- The 3-T Model of Informed Consent for Nonstandard Risk Donors: A Proposal for Transplant Clinical Practice.Transplantation direct · 2021Article
- Analyzing the paradigmatic cases of two persons with a disorder of consciousness: reflections on the legal and ethical perspectives.BMC medical ethics · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In the last decades, new technologies have improved the survival of patients affected by chronic illnesses. Among them, left ventricular assist device (LVAD) has represented a viable solution for patients with advanced heart failure (HF). Even though the LVAD prolongs life expectancy, patients' vulnerability generally increases during follow up and patients' request for the device withdrawal might occur. Such a request raises some ethical concerns in that it directly hastens the patient's death. Hence, in order to assess the ethical acceptability of LVAD withdrawal, we analyse and examine an ethical argument, widely adopted in the literature, that we call the "descriptive approach", which consists in giving a definition of life-sustaining treatment to evaluate the ethical acceptability of treatment withdrawal. Focusing attention on LVAD, we show criticisms of this perspective. Finally, we assess every patient's request of LVAD withdrawal through a prescriptive approach, which finds its roots in the criterion of proportionality.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.