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Record W4415220386 · doi:10.1093/ageing/afaf297

‘I am old, and I will rather abandon life with my eyes open’: a qualitative study of Norwegians aged 80 and older explaining their intensive care unit admission preferences

2025· article· en· W4415220386 on OpenAlexaff
G. Schwarz, Britt Sjøbø, Elisabeth Skaar, Ingrid Miljeteig, Karen E. A. Burns, Reidar Kvåle, Hans Flaatten, Margrethe Aase Schaufel

Bibliographic record

VenueAge and Ageing · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldMedicine
TopicPalliative Care and End-of-Life Issues
Canadian institutionsHamilton Health SciencesMcMaster UniversityUniversity of TorontoSt. Michael's Hospital
FundersUniversitetet i Bergen
KeywordsNorwegianQualitative researchAutonomyIntensive care unitUnit (ring theory)Focus groupOlder people

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

BACKGROUND: The treatment preferences of patients aged 80 and older in the event of acute critical illness vary widely and are difficult to predict. To provide the appropriate level of care, it is necessary to better understand their personal treatment goals. OBJECTIVE: To gain insight into the underlying reasoning for intensive care unit (ICU) admission preferences in hypothetical events of acute critical illness stated by Norwegian survey respondents aged 80 and over. METHODS: A purposive sample of 202 Norwegian outpatients ≥80 years old who were considered potential ICU candidates provided 297 free-text comments to elaborate on their ICU admission choices in hypothetical scenarios of acute critical illness. Data were collected from November 2021 to March 2023 and analysed by Systematic Text Condensation, a method for thematic cross-case analysis. A theoretical framework for autonomy and trust in modern bioethics was utilized to focus the analysis. MAIN FINDINGS: All four main findings comprised descriptions of how the respondents sought to exercise autonomy. They explained their ICU admission preferences by (i) desiring to control the uncontrollable, (ii) prioritizing outcomes of importance to them, (iii) placing trust and (iv) accepting a larger context. We identified patterns ranging from the individual autonomy of varying degrees of action to the principled autonomy of obligation. Several justifications were relevant to different treatment choices. CONCLUSION: Despite variable expressions through different justifications, our findings highlight the need for a greater understanding of older patients' requirements for autonomy and a strong patient-centred focus in ICU admission decision-making.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: Qualitative
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.008
Threshold uncertainty score0.435

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.112
GPT teacher head0.421
Teacher spread0.309 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designQualitative
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations4
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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