Uncanny Kitty Senses Patients' Death

'Oscar' alerts dementia ward staff when the end is near.

By E.J. Mundell
HealthDay Reporter
Thursday, July 26, 2007; 12:00 AM

Copyright © 2007 ScoutNews, LLC. All rights reserved.

THURSDAY, July 26 (HealthDay News) -- When he curls up beside a frail, elderly patient in a Rhode Island dementia-care unit, Oscar the cat is telling the staff that death is near.

The two-year-old tabby has done so with almost perfect accuracy 25 times since he was brought into the ward as a kitten. He tends to ignore patients until the moments when his comfort is perhaps needed the most, staff members say.

"He has pretty much spotted each of our dying patients over the course of the last year," said Dr. David Dosa, a geriatrician who works in the end-stage dementia ward at Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, in Providence.

"He really seems to understand when it is about to happen, and he is there," added Dosa, who has brought Oscar to world attention in an essay in this week's New England Journal of Medicine.

Oscar, like his Sesame Street namesake, is not the friendliest of felines, avoiding most of the physically healthier patients on the ward as they shuffle by, Dosa reported. And yet, he has become an important source of information on something even the best doctors have trouble predicting: death.

"A day or so beforehand, he'll start to show interest in a particular room," Dosa said, and unfailingly, a patient in that room will die within the next 48 hours. "He will often curl up with the patient in bed -- sometimes, he'll just sit there on the bed, but often he will nuzzle up, particularly if the patient is alone," Dosa added.

Do patients understand that the cat is there?

Dosa isn't sure. "This is an end-stage dementia unit, so my sense is that, for the most part, most of the patients passing through here have lost the capacity to understand what is going on," he said. "Still, I do think that they take great comfort in the fact that there is an animal there."

Oscar's "sixth sense" is often of great importance to the dying patient's loved ones, as well. "Oftentimes, medical staff have a sense that somebody is nearing the end," Dosa said, "but it's anybody's guess as to when it might occur. And that's a problem for families, because they like to bring people in from outside, sometimes other areas of the country. Often you can't give people more than a ballpark estimate of death."