Around a third of nursing home residents with severe dementia are being fed through a tube.

Swallowing difficulties are a common symptom of dementia. Although feeding the patient through a tube is one way of dealing with this, it's now known that tube feeding is not beneficial. It actually increases health risks and causes more discomfort to the patient.

So it's disturbing to learn that the use of feeding tubes is widespread among patients with advanced dementia in the United States. Researchers from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, surveyed almost 187,000 nursing home residents with severe dementia. They found the rate of tube feeding was 34 per cent.

Tube feeding was more likely in nursing homes operating on a for profit basis, located in urban areas, having more than 100 beds and lacking a special dementia care unit. Better care planning for patients with severe dementia is needed to reduce the use of feeding tubes.

Source

Journal of the American Medical Association 2nd July 2003