Background: The assessment of health states considered to be worse than dead is a controversial issue.<P>Objective: To investigate how health states are valued when they are close to dead. Differences between adjacent states are compared with the differences between the first positive|first...</p>

Thirty students and thirty-five elderly people compared the quality of life of imaginary patients of different ages suffering from end-stage renal disease. By manipulating the time the imaginary patients had to be on a transplantation waiting list, the utility of health at different periods of...