May Not Help Emaciated, Bed-Ridden Patient. May Not Help Emaciated, Bed-Ridden Patient Frail, demented nursing home patients can eventually lose the ability to take food and fluids by mouth. When that process begins to occur tube feedings may be started. Doctors and family members may believe that such feedings prolong life and improve the ability to fight bedsores and disease. Dr. Thomas Finucane, a nationally recognized expert practicing Geriatric Medicine at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, challenges that easy assumption.
Randomized trials are the gold standard for evaluating whether treatments are effective.
Such trials are generally lacking with respect to tube feeding. Other data, some quite persuasive, have been developed, and these studies are virtually unanimous in showing lack of effectiveness. Several lines of evidence suggest that tube feeding will not prolong survival when compared to a conscientious effort at hand feeding. Death rates are very high in the days and months after feeding tubes are placed. Aspiration pneumonia usually arises from inadvertent inhalation of either contaminated oral secretions or of regurgitated gastric contents.