How is time to death calculated in terminally I’ll patients?
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It depends.
When patients are first given the diagnosis of a lifethreatening disease, it is based on statistics collected from lots and lots of other cases.
So if someone gets diagnosed with ALS, the doctors can say that on average a person has 5 good years after diagnosos (as an example).
Or if a person gets diagnosed with metastatic liver cancer, the doctors can say “the majority of patients with similar cancers die within six months”.
Later in the process, it’s more an evaluation of that specific patient, their symptoms and the progression of their disease between scans/checks.
In the late terminal stage, doctors and nurses will have a general idea of whether we are talking hours, days or weeks before death based on the symptoms and how the patient looks/sounds/smells.
Speaking as a nurse, this is also how we try to frame it for the relatives. “It’s a matter of days, not weeks” for instance will give families are very concrete sense of how much time is left.
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