Men do not understand the realities of prostate cancer treatment
June 16th, 2009 Posted in prostate cancerA newly published study appearing in the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine appears to demonstrate that patients newly diagnosed with localized prostate cancer grossly underestimate their life expectancy without treatment and grossly overestimate the survival benefit of treatment.
What is clear from this study is that the patients’ expectations of their treatment (or lack of it) bore little relation ship to reality. These data would seem to correlate with the types of behaviors and questions that are evident from peer discussions between newly diagnosed patients and other, previously treated patients — especially patients previously diagnosed with and treated for localized disease.
As the study followed a survey to 184 men with newly diagnosed, localized prostate cancer, it would also be extremely interesting to see similar data from a significantly larger study.