title: [Assessment of patients' capacity to give a valid consent].
abstract: Autonomy is an inherent condition of every ethical act. This attribution is expressed, when decisions are made, as capacity. Physician-patient alliance is defied when there is a reasonable doubt of patients' ability to make a choice, an extraordinarily complex scenario. As a response, in the last few decades multiple tools have been developed aiming to determine in a standardized fashion whether capacity is present or not. In the present article, we present a classification of the most well-known tools and discuss their usefulness, the implications for standardization of capacity, and make recommendations for their use, based in evidence.
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Psiquiatría, División de Neurociencias, Facultad de Medicina, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile.
authors.forename: Sebastián
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Robert B
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Psiquiatría, División de Neurociencias, Facultad de Medicina, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile.
authors.forename: Juan I
authors.initials: JI
authors.lastname: Reculé
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Psiquiatría, División de Neurociencias, Facultad de Medicina, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile.
authors.forename: Juan A
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Prato
mesh_terms: D032882:Comprehension; D003657:Decision Making; D004185:Disability Evaluation; D004992:Ethics, Medical; D006801:Humans; D007258:Informed Consent; D007407:Interviews as Topic / Q000379:methods; D016743:Mental Competency; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D010358:Patient Participation; D026684:Personal Autonomy; D010817:Physician-Patient Relations; D015203:Reproducibility of Results