With the advancements in the levels of awareness, patients are increasingly playing a decision-making role in their own course of treatment. Recent developments and research studies suggest that doctors must opt for all necessary precautions when providing relevant comparative risk information to their patients.

Providing all comparative risk information based on the average women’s risk for breast cancer can affect treatment decisions and could be potentially harmful if given to women without the necessary precautions and adopting sufficient care.

 Breast

Assimilation with common hypothetical scenarios brings up the results, women who were told their risk for breast cancer was ‘below average’ were less likely to undergo beneficial treatments, while women who reported their risk to be above average were more inclined to undergo risky treatments. Surprisingly, both were having the same degree of individual risks.

Dr. Angela Fagerlin and her colleagues from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, USA, said in the journal “Patient Education and Counseling”, “Given the potential biasing effects of comparative risk information, we must ask if it is wise to give patients the information they want, since that information may actually harm them”.

Researchers randomly surveyed 249 women who were visitors to a hospital cafeteria. All women were given a scenario in which their own risk for breast cancer was nearly 6%. Half of them were then told that the average woman’s risk for breast cancer was 12%, reporting that their risk was below average, and the remaining ones were told the average risk was 3%, reporting that their risk was above average.

All these women were then asked to choose whether they would prefer taking a pill that would reduce their risk for breast cancer from 6% to 3%.It was a scenario based on the administration of a prophylactic selective estrogen-receptor modulator.

These women were also told that the pill also has some commonly associated minor side effects like hot flashes and there is a possibility in rare cases for developing cataracts or heart attack.

The researchers also found that women with a hypothetical risk for breast cancer that was reported to be above average were more likely to endorse taking the pill and more likely to believe that the pill provided a significant reduction in breast cancer risk in comparison to the women whose hypothetical risk was reported to be below average.

Irrespective of their own decision, 62% of the women expressed that the average risk information was helpful in making a decision about whether or not to take the drug.
“They’re focusing too much on where they stack up against average and they disregard their own individual risk information and what that risk means to them“, says Dr. Angela Fagerlin, the lead researcher.

Researchers also put forward a caution that though the main objectives of the study was to establish a relation between physician-patient communication and to prepare patients to make informed decisions, some information may not be particularly helpful.

Researchers further advised that, “When designing decision aids, developers must contemplate the potential implications of providing comparative information to patients and not just include it simply because patients want to see it”.

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