Forward Look
By The Numbers
Comfort with math may affect treatment choices.By Cameron Walker
Talking to doctors about cancer and its treatment often means being bombarded with numbers, from percentages to risk ratios. Yet many people don’t fully comprehend what the numbers mean. As a result, cancer patients may not understand their prognosis, the effect a treatment might have,
or their risk for recurrence.
To help people become more comfortable with numbers and more in control of their health care decisions, researchers are studying both how cancer patients interpret statistics and the best way to present math facts. For example, researchers at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, surveyed 105 breast cancer patients with hormone-sensitive tumors who had been given four post-surgery treatment options and the 10-year cancer-free survival rate for each treatment.
No comments:
Post a Comment