ARCHIVES OF INTERNAL MEDICINE

Personal interviews were held with a nationwide stratified sample of 410 physicians (response rate, 85%) about the most recent cases in which they used terminal sedation, defined as administering drugs to keep the patient continuously in deep sedation or coma until death without giving artificial nutrition or hydration (n=211), or performed euthanasia, defined as administering a lethal drug at the request of a patient with the explicit intention to hasten death (n=123). To provide an overview of the absolute risks in the 2 treatment groups as well as risk differences between them, we calculated crude mortality rates and presented Kaplan-Meier plots of survival with log-rank tests.