Palliative Sedation and End of Life: Lights and Shadows

We read with great interest the article of Rietjens et al1 about continuous deep sedation in Netherlands. The authors compared the rate of deep sedation at the end of life in 2005, 2010, and 2015, and they found a considerable increase of this practice throughout the years, especially for older and cancer patients. Palliative sedation (PS) often represents a fundamental tool in long-term care medicine for physicians attending to terminally ill patients, when no other treatments can relieve their suffering.