[Autonomy or compassion? Values to be taken into account in the treatment of patients suffering Alzheimer's disease].

Advance directives applied to decision making in assisting people with neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer disease faces professionals with an ethical dilemma that seems to have a pole on the autonomy enjoyed by the subject when gave such directions and in the other the compassion that awakens the individual at the time of their implementation. In this paper we take the concepts of R. Dworkin of experiential interests(i.e. things that people do just because they like the experience of doing them) and critical interests (interests, which if not satisfied, people would think they were worse off in some way or that their life had been wasted) to discuss about autonomy of persons with dementia. To what extent the subject that provides advance directives knows about his or her future experience? Is it enough to have a statistical knowledge about the evolution of certain conditions to make early decisions about our own very existence? When a disease like Alzheimer bursts into the life of a person, is personal identity disrupted in such a way that decisions taken before lose strength or is there a continuum that should guide the actions of those who attend?