Prognosis and cardiopulmonary resuscitation in elderly patients

To the Editor: Dr. Murphy and his colleagues (Feb. 24 issue)¹ substantiate the fact that elderly patients both understand the implications of prognostic information concerning the results of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and are willing to alter their preferences in response to it. Such studies support the position that we can eliminate the presumption of consent for CPR and instead allow individual patients to make their own informed choices. However, we suggest that the pie chart shown in their Figure 1 should be modified to deal forthrightly with the risk of neurologic disability for patients who do survive resuscitation. In our.