Preferences for life-sustaining treatments examined by hidden Markov modeling are mostly stable in terminally ill cancer patients’ last 6 months of life

Stability of life-sustaining treatment (LST) preferences at end of life (EOL) has not been well established for terminally ill cancer patients nor have transition probabilities been explored between different types of preferences. We assessed the stability of cancer patients' LST preferences at EOL by identifying distinct LST-preference states and examining the probability of each state transitioning to other states between consecutive time points.

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