Because of the lack of specific indicators for the end-of-life time frame, it is not clear what is encompassed
in end-of-life care. Frequently, people assume that end-of-life care is providing comfort care and
holistic care to dying patients and their family in a time frame of days to weeks when they are actively dying.
But if end-of-life care is framed only by the brief time interval before actual death, many patients would be
left without receiving adequate end-of-life care because their time frames are not well predicted. In greatly
aging societies such as Japan, many older adults are going through one of the two trajectories that make it
difficult to determine when they enter the end of life and predict approaching death.