Ethiopian Review

BOSTON (Reuters) – Doctors in Belgium have ended the lives of substantially more terminally ill people since a euthanasia law was passed in 2002, researchers said on Wednesday.

However, while the increase might have been expected, the number of patients dying that way remains small — in part because of the use of more pain relieving drugs has been encouraged under a separate law also passed that year.

Of the 3,623 deaths included in the survey covering 2007, only 1.9 percent — about 70 — involved actively killing a patient, the researchers reported in the New England Journal of Medicine. In 1998, the euthanasia rate was 1.1 percent.

“There are now more patients who can make their own request to end life, compared to 1998, because the physician and patient were not allowed to talk about ending life,” Johan Bilsen of Vrije University Brussel, who led the study, said.

“It’s almost doubled since 1998 and it’s almost six times more than in 2001, so it is substantially increased.”

Bilsen said being more aggressive about giving drugs to relieve pain or sedating terminally ill patients may be more common now because of the changed euthanasia legislation and because the separate law passed in 2002 promoted better pain relief and palliative care.

“We found that the enactment of the Belgian euthanasia law was followed by an increase in all types of medical end-of-life practices, with the exception of the use of lethal drugs without the patient’s explicit request,” the researchers wrote.

Nearly 48 percent of the deaths studied for 2007 involved practices that carried the risk of hastening death, including intensive pain relief or withholding treatment, the researchers found, compared to 38 percent in 2001.

Included in that percentage, nearly 27 percent of all people covered by the survey died from high doses of pain drugs, up from 18.4 percent in 1998. Drugs related to morphine ease pain and suffering but also slow breathing.

In addition, the rate of continuous deep sedation, where patients are put into a deep sleep as death approaches, increased to 14.5 percent of all deaths in 2007, up from 8.2 percent in 2001.

- By Gene Emery | Reuters

- Michelle