A new study reports that elderly patients with advanced dementia are seven times more likely to receive antibiotics in their last two weeks of life.

Many experts, including the Alzheimer’s Association, consider Alzheimer’s and other dementias to be fatal brain diseases. Patients die of infections such as pneumonia and other complications, but the underlying cause is damage to brain cells.

Researchers from Harvard Medical School studied more than 214 patients with an average of 85 in 21 Boston-area nursing homes. Ninety-nine patients died during the 18-month study, the first to look at antibiotics prescriptions for people in the end stages of dementia.

Participants could talk little if at all, could not walk, were incontinent, and needed help with eating. “They were at what anyone would consider the very final stage,” study co-author Susan Mitchell, a senior scientist with the Harvard-affiliated Hebrew Senior Life Institute for Aging Research in Boston and Dr. Erica D’Agata, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School said in the study.

The study found that 42 percent of patients received antibiotics, many intravenously, within two weeks of their deaths. The closer they were to death, the more likely they were to receive antibiotics.

“Antibiotics exposure is extensive in nursing home residents with advanced dementia, and it increases as patients near death. We really need to determine if antibiotics should be given to patients at the end of life. Do they benefit from treatment,” the two doctors said.

In an accompanying editorial, Dr. Mitchell J. Schwaber and Dr. Yehuda Carmeli of Tel Aviv Medical Center argue that using antibiotics in these patients requires the same degree of ethical deliberation as avoiding them.

Other experts had pro and con opinions on whether to give these patients antibiotics or not. Dr. Eric Tangalos, a geriatrician at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, who was not involved in the study, said “there’s always hope” and “people do recover from those infections,” the Associated Press quoted him.

On the other hand, Bruce Jennings, a bioethicist with the Hastings Center, a research institute on medical ethics said the extra time that doctors bought for these patients by administering them antibiotics “is not beneficial,” as their dementia does not improve.

Generally, antibiotic overuse contributes to the rise of superbugs, so experts have been calling doctors to curb the liberal prescribing of antibiotics in many types of patients, including children with earaches and adults with sore throats.

The study appeared in Monday issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine.