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Editorial
. 2025 Mar;37(1):39-45.
doi: 10.1007/s10730-024-09526-5. Epub 2024 Apr 26.

Prognostic Disclosure to Dying Adolescents Against Parental Wishes: A Point-Counter Point Debate

Mariah K Tanious  1   2 , Grant Goodrich  3   4   5 , Virginia Pedigo  6 , Shelly Ozark  3   7 , Joshua Arenth  3   4   6
Affiliations
Editorial

Prognostic Disclosure to Dying Adolescents Against Parental Wishes: A Point-Counter Point Debate

Mariah K Tanious et al. HEC Forum. 2025 Mar.

Abstract

An adolescent's last moment of life is an emotionally and medically complex time. Children may grapple with understanding the things happening to them and with grief of a future lost; caregivers struggle to simultaneously balance deep sorrow, hope, and love; and healthcare providers fight to maintain sound medical and ethical decision making. Increased discussion regarding adolescent end-of-life care is needed so that clinicians may better understand how to engage in ethically based medical management during these events. This holds particularly true in situations where potentially conflicting ideas exist between clinicians and family members. We describe the case of an acutely and terminally ill adolescent who remained cognitively intact but with rapidly advancing multiple organ failure and whose parents requested that he remain uninformed of his critical illness and prognosis.

Keywords: Disclosure; Pediatrics; Prognosis; Shared decision-making.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declarations. Ethical Approval: Formal review and approval was waived by the Institutional Review Board of the Medical University of South Carolina in view of the retrospective nature of the case study involving a single, deidentified patient case. Consent: Consent was not required given the anonymized nature of the vignette without identifying details or images. Data Transparency: No primary data or materials were included in this article beyond published studies cited within the text. Competing Interests: The authors have no competing interests (financial or non-financial) to declare that are relevant to the content of this article.

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