Visual Aids for Multimodal Treatment Options to Support Decision Making of Patients with Colorectal Cancer

BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making

Research Article

Sabine Hofmann¹  Janina Vetter¹  Christiane Wachter¹  Doris Henne-Bruns¹  Marko Kornmann¹  Franz Porzsolt² 

[1] Department of General and Visceral Surgery, University of Ulm, Albert-Einstein-Allee 23, 89081, Ulm, Germany;Study Group of Health Services Research at the Department of General and Visceral Surgery, University of Ulm, Albert-Einstein-Allee 23, 89081, Ulm, Germany;

关键词: Visual aids;    Colorectal cancer;    Quality of life;    Side effects;    Shared decision-making;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1472-6947-12-118

 received in 2011-10-25, accepted in 2012-08-31,  发布年份 2012

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundA variety of multimodal treatment options are available for colorectal cancer and many patients want to be involved in decisions about their therapies. However, their desire for autonomy is limited by lack of disease-specific knowledge. Visual aids may be helpful tools to present complex data in an easy-to-understand, graphic form to lay persons. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the treatment preferences of healthy persons and patients using visual aids depicting multimodal treatment options for colorectal cancer.MethodsWe designed visual aids for treatment scenarios based on four key studies concerning multimodal treatment of colorectal cancer. The visual aids were composed of diagrams depicting outcome parameters and side effects of two treatment options. They were presented to healthy persons (n = 265) and to patients with colorectal cancer (n = 102).ResultsMost patients and healthy persons could make immediate decisions after seeing the diagrams (range: 88% – 100%). Patients (79%) chose the intensive-treatment option in the scenario with a clear survival benefit. In scenarios without survival benefit, all groups clearly preferred the milder treatment option (range: 78% - 90%). No preference was seen in the scenario depicting equally intense treatment options with different timing (neoadjuvant vs. adjuvant) but without survival benefit.ConclusionsHealthy persons’ and patients’ decisions using visual aids seem to be influenced by quality-of-life aspects rather than recurrence rates especially in situations without survival benefit. In the future visual aids may help to improve the management of patients with colorectal cancer.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Hofmann et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2012. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.