Jonathan Horey and Dr. Bruce Brown, Psychology
Purpose
Although prostate cancer is the most common malignancy affecting males in the western world, the detection and management of this disease has produced intense controversy among researchers and physicians alike. As a result, men who are diagnosed with prostate cancer are forced to select a course of treatment from a confusing list of contradicting reports and limited data. The purpose of this study is to identify those sources of information that post-treatment prostate cancer patients believe were the most helpful to them when making their treatment decision as well as those sources that had the greatest impact on their treatment selection. The instrument that will be used in this study is a carefully constructed patient-preference questionnaire, designed by the researchers, that will focus on the various sources of information that are available to patients with prostate cancer. Men who have received a diagnosis of prostate cancer, and who have already selected a treatment program, will be asked to complete the questionnaire. The information gathered from this effort will then be used to develop educational programs and resources for patients based on those informational sources identified by post-treatment patients as the most influential in their decision making process. In this way, it is hoped that information transfer between doctors and patients will be more efficient and that patients will be more satisfied with the treatment program they select. The results of this study will be submitted to The Journal of Urology, The Journal of Urologic Oncology, Urology and other related periodicals for publication.
Background and Significance
Interest in the detection and treatment of prostate cancer has steadily increased over the past two decades as researchers have made important discoveries that have dramatically decreased the morbidity of this cancer. However, many of these new treatment programs and detection techniques have yet to gain wide acceptance in the medical community. This has resulted in contradicting reports of success and failure using these various methods. As the medical community awaits further studies aimed at confirming the efficacy of the latest advancements in prostate cancer treatment and detection, prostate cancer patients must still make a treatment decision. Unfortunately, very few studies have been designed with the goal of determining what information is most important to patients when they are faced with this important decision. As a result, many patients become frustrated by the lack of pertinent literature.
Researchers investigating other types of cancers have conducted studies designed to determine efficient information delivery methods. One group of researchers found that many times consultation with doctors is of little help because of poor recall among cancer patients (Hack, Degner & Dyck, 1994). At the same time, other researchers have found that cancer patients desire more education regarding their disease and treatment than ever before (Chapman, et al., 1998). In order for patients to feel satisfied about their treatment decision, physicians must determine what methods are most useful to the patient when making his decision. It is our hypothesis that patients are significantly influenced by the opinions of friends and relatives and that many patients make their treatment decisions based on these opinions rather than on the advice of their physicians alone.
Methods and Procedures
This study will be conducted by mailing a patient-preference questionnaire to 330 prostate cancer patients who underwent radical prostatectomy surgery at Oregon Health Sciences University (OHSU) under the direction of Dr. Bruce Lowe, M.D., chief of Urologic Oncology at OHSU. Informed consent will be obtained from the patients, and IRB approval is in process at Oregon Health Sciences University. This questionnaire includes questions regarding patient demographics as well as family health background. Most importantly, however, the questionnaire asks patients to identify which sources of information (people, media, etc.) were most important to them when they selected a treatment program. Specifically, patients are asked to rate the influence that friends, family, media and professionals had on their final decision. Patients also are asked to indicate whether they would make the same decision today based upon their experiences with their own treatment program. In addition, ample space is provided for patients to detail their own specific decisional process. This data will then be statistically analyzed in order to determine which sources of information proved to be the most important in the treatment decision process. This statistical analysis will be completed under the direction of Dr. Bruce Brown of the Psychology department, whose expertise in the field of statistics will be essential for the evaluation of the data. Most of Winter Semester will be spent analyzing this data using the appropriate statistical programs, with submission for publication expected in the spring or summer of 2001.
Encl: Survey Instrument