ArticleAnnals of intensive care2025
End-of-life decision disparities according to the gross national income in critically ill patients: a secondary analysis of the ETHICUS-2 study.
Article in Annals of intensive care, 2025. 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
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
The trial behind it
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.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Decades of intensive care medicine trials: what randomised evidence has changed, corrected, and still questions to resolve.Intensive care medicine · 2026Review
- Sliding doors at the bedside: conditional outcomes and moral judgments in end-of-life care.Critical care (London, England) · 2026Review
- Nurses' Experience in Providing End-of-Life Care in Intensive Care Unit: A Scoping Review.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Pain perception and attitudes toward life-sustaining treatment in pediatric patients with disorders of consciousness: a survey of Chinese healthcare professionals.Frontiers in neurologyArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
aimThis study aimed to evaluate the association of end-of-life decisions and time to death in a global cohort of critically ill patients who participated in the international study on end-of-life practices in intensive care units (ICU) (Ethicus-2 study).
methodsA post hoc analysis was conducted on data from a worldwide observational study that prospectively recruited adult ICU patients who died between September 1, 2015, and September 30, 2016, from 199 ICUs in 36 countries.
resultsThe end-of-life pathways of 10,547 ICU non-survivors were s analysed. Patients in high-income countries exhibited a significantly shorter time to death compared to those from middle-income countries. Additionally, therapeutic decisions were found to have a significant but varied association with the length of ICU stay across gross national income (GNI) groups. Specifically, patients in high-income countries with no decision had the shortest length of stay (LOS) overall. However, withdrawing or withholding life-sustaining treatment led to longer LOS in both middle and high GNI countries.
conclusionThis study's findings highlight the need for uniformity in global end-of-life decision-making. Outcomes are significantly associated with gross national income (GNI). Moreover, patients in high-income nations tend to have shorter ICU stays before death.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.