NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - There is no indication that legal physician-assisted suicide, which is practiced in Oregon and the Netherlands, has a disproportionate impact on patients in vulnerable groups, according to a report in the Journal of Medical Ethics.

"There's no evidence for a particularly physician-focused form of the 'slippery-slope' allegation: namely, that physicians would be corrupted into putting vulnerable patients to death more readily if legalization were to occur," Dr. Margaret P. Battin from University of Utah, Salt Lake City, told Reuters Health.

Battin and colleagues investigated whether the lives of people in groups considered vulnerable, such as the elderly, women, the uninsured, and others, are more frequently ended with assistance from a physician than others in the population in two jurisdictions where physician-assisted dying is legal.

There was no evidence of a heightened risk for the elderly, women, people with low educational status, the poor, racial and ethnic minorities, or people with non-terminal physical abilities or chronic non-terminal illnesses, the authors report.

Based on the data available, newborn infants with severe deficits and patients with psychiatric illness, including depression and Alzheimer's disease, were not at heightened risk of physician-assisted dying.

Although the numbers are small, the investigators note, people with AIDS in Oregon were 30 times more likely to use assisted dying than those who had chronic respiratory disorders and were thus at a heightened risk.

"The joint picture yielded by the available data in the two jurisdictions shows that people who died with a physician's assistance were more likely to be members of groups enjoying comparative social, economic, educational, professional, and other privileges," the researchers note.

"This is an issue for both proponents and opponents of legalization, not something which serves the interests of just one side," Battin concluded.

Journal of Medical Ethics, October 2007.