查看文章

Among patients with severe traumatic brain injury (TBI), there is high prognostic uncertainty but growing evidence that recovery of independence is possible. Nevertheless, families are often asked to make decisions about withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment (WLST) within days of injury. The range of potential outcomes for patients who died after WLST (WLST+) is unknown, posing a challenge for prognostic modeling and clinical counseling. We investigated the potential for survival and recovery of independence after acute TBI in patients who died after WLST. We used Transforming Research and Clinical Knowledge in TBI (TRACK-TBI) data and propensity score matching to pair participants with WLST+ to those with a similar probability of WLST (based on demographic and clinical characteristics), but for whom life-sustaining treatment was not withdrawn (WLST−). To optimize matching, we divided the WLST …