Table 3.

Differences between the relatives and friends of 58 cancer patients who died by euthanasia in the University Medical Center Utrecht between 1992 and 1999 and of 114 control cancer patients who died from natural causes in scores for grief, post-traumatic stress reactions, general wellbeing, and depressive symptoms. Values are means (95% confidence intervals) unless stated otherwise

	Mean (95% CI) scores by cause of death		Difference (95% CI)*
Questionnaire	Euthanasia (n=189)	Natural death (n=316)	Crude	Adjusted for education, EPQ, and kinship with patient	Adjusted for all†	Adjusted for opportunity to “say goodbye”
Inventory of traumatic grief	39 (38 to 41)‡	45 (43 to 47)‡	−7.05 (−10.64 to −3.45)	−5.54 (−8.95 to −2.12)	−5.29 (−8.44 to −2.15)	−5.51 (−9.29 to −1.73)
Texas revised inventory of grief	46 (44 to 48)	42 (41 to 43)	3.57 (1.23 to 5.91)	2.60 (0.27 to 4.92)	2.93 (0.85 to 5.01)	2.77 (0.31 to 5.24)
Impact of event scale	13 (11 to 15)	18 (16 to 19)	−4.78 (−7.66 to −1.89)	−3.74 (−6.54 to −0.94)	−2.79 (−5.33 to −0.25)	−3.14 (−6.09 to −0.19)
Symptom checklist	116 (111 to 120)	121 (118 to 125)	−5.62 (−11.83 to 0.59)	−2.43 (−6.93 to 2.07)	−1.61 (−6.29 to 3.08)	−2.46 (−9.0 to 4.08)
Depressive adjective checklist	9 (8 to 10)	9 (9 to 10)	−0.04 (−0.92 to 0.84)	0.34 (−0.42 to 1.10)	0.40 (−0.39 to 1.19)	0.40 (−0.53 to 1.32)

EPQ=Eysenck personality questionnaire.

^*Differences obtained by multilevel regression analysis, 95% confidence intervals calculated with robust standard errors.

^†Adjusted for: education, EPQ score, kinship with dead patient, age, sex, self efficacy score, religion, support of bereaved, depression of dead patient, patient's age at death, patient's length of treatable illness, patient's duration of illness, period between questionnaire and patient's date of death, adequate pain treatment for patient, adequate treatment of gastrointestinal complaints for patient, other complaints of patient, and whether the cancer was treatable at time of diagnosis.

^‡Geometric mean.