A recent Harvard study found that almost one-third of the 1.8 million Medicare beneficiaries who were over the age of 65 and died in 2008 had surgery within a year of their deaths, which some believe proves that end-of-life surgeries are largely ineffective, Business Week reports.

Lead author Ashish Jha, a professor of health policy and management at Harvard, told the news source that the study suggests that many of the surgeries performed on seniors may be unnecessary.

"We're not having the kinds of conversations with patients that we need to have, about what they want out of their last few days and how we help them achieve those goals," he told the news source.

However, others argue that the results of the study do not conclusively mean that surgeries are not worthwhile, The New York Times reports. Dr. Peter B. Bach of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center told the news source that the patient's death does not mean that the treatment and therapies involved in senior care were not valuable - there could have been other factors based on the individual.

Researchers were surprised at the high number of surgeries they noted in the study, but did not know why the surgeries had been performed. Some were likely to relieve pain and suffering, while others may have been designed to prolong life. In addition, some may have been performed to fix something that may not necessarily save a dying patient, the news source reports. The researchers said that they know from experience that doctors sometimes do this to avoid a difficult conversation with the patient and family members.

In addition to the one-third of seniors who had surgery in their last year of life, the study, which was published in The Lancet, found that one in five seniors had surgery in the month leading up to the end of their life, and one in 10 had an operation in the last week of their lives, the media outlet reports.

The study also showed regional and age variations in the number of surgeries performed. For example, the rate of surgery in Honolulu, Hawaii was one third of the rate in Gary, Indiana. Researchers also noted that fewer people who died between the ages of 80 to 90 underwent surgeries.

“My sense is that a lot of surgeons are still uncomfortable with doing surgery on the very elderly, and that’s why they back off,” Jha said.