Beating the Odds

Breast cancer sufferers generally have poor knowledge of their condition

There are always people who swim against the tide of expected behaviour or move outside the square.

A few years ago, a friend who fought breast cancer hard for four years before sadly losing her battle with it, made it her business to find out all she could about her disease and what it could do.

Information she gathered included the grade she had, what survival percentage she was in, trends in sufferers, why some people with similar disease types, treatments, expected time-frames and outcomes lived and others died and various other information.

She was also interested in the treatment process. The types of chemotherapy used, how they worked on the cancer and right down to the machines that calibrated the exact position of where the tumours were situated in the body, in preparation for the radio therapy process.

What was even more amazing, was that she wasn’t particularly fazed by what she found out. One revelation she made was the grade she had – which was apparently the worst you could get in New Zealand, and one that didn’t have a particularly successful outcome!

I guessed at the time, that all this research perhaps took the fear out of it all for her. The more she knew about it, the less frightening it became perhaps? I never knew.

However it would seem many women globally, faced with this awful dilemma, may not want to know about it, which may impede their ability to perhaps have a fighting chance against the disease, even though the outcome may not be a good one.

A new international study has found that many women with breast cancer lack knowledge about their illness.

Some being less likely to know and report accurate information about their tumours’ characteristics.

Published early online, the findings highlight the need to educate patients about their health conditions, which could lead to more informed treatment decisions, according to CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society.

Having knowledge about your own health conditions or your risk of developing different conditions can help you take steps to maintain or improve your health, the publication reports.

Although previous studies have examined general cancer knowledge, no prior study has examined whether women actually know and understand the details about their own cancers.

Rachel Freedman, MD, MPH, of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, and her colleagues surveyed 500 women with breast cancer to see how knowledgeable they were about their own cancers; including the tumor stage, grade, and receptor status (also known as breast cancer subtype). Overall, 32 to 82 percent reported that they knew each of the tumour characteristics that they were asked about, while only 20 to 58 percent actually reported these characteristics correctly.

“Our results illustrate the lack of understanding many patients have about their cancers and have identified a critical need for improved patient education and provider awareness of this issue,” says Dr Freedman.

Improving patients’ understanding about why a particular treatment is important for the individual situation may lead to more informed decisions and better adherence to treatment, she says.

Dr Freedman noted that improved understanding of tumour characteristics and the reasons for personalised treatment recommendations could also improve a woman’s trust, confidence, and satisfaction with her cancer treatment providers.

Link for the publication CANCER:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1002/(ISSN)1097-0142