Of the 1.8 million Medicare patients over age 65 who died in 2008, researchers found that a third had undergone surgery in the year before death and that 18% of those surgeries had occurred in the month before death. Nearly 1 in 10 had surgery in their final week. The numbers were surprisingly high, researchers said.

To some extent, the finding makes sense: sick people have surgery and sick people also die. But while the researchers did not examine whether individual surgeries were necessary or whether they improved patients’ quality of life — many surely did — the data suggested they did not improve outcomes overall. Areas of the country that had high rates of surgery also had high rates of death…

“In a lot of places, we’re doing a lot of these surgeries I think unnecessarily,” lead author Ashish Jha, a professor of health policy and management at the Harvard School of Public Health, told Bloomberg. “We’re not having the kinds of conversations with patients that we need to have, about what they want out of their last few days and how we help them achieve those goals.”