The Impact of 4 Risk Communication Interventions on Cancer Screening Preferences and Knowledge
K. D. Valentine,
Pete Wegier,
Victoria A. Shaffer and
Laura D. Scherer
Additional contact information
K. D. Valentine: Division of General Internal Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, USA
Pete Wegier: Sinai Health, Toronto, ON, Canada
Victoria A. Shaffer: University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, USA
Laura D. Scherer: University of Colorado, Denver, CO, USA
Medical Decision Making, 2022, vol. 42, issue 3, 387-397
Abstract:
Purpose The US Preventive Services Task Force has changed their screening recommendations, encouraging informed patient choice and shared decision making as a result of emerging evidence. We aimed to compare the impact of a didactic intervention, a descriptive harms intervention, a narrative intervention, and a new risk communication strategy titled Aiding Risk Information learning through Simulated Experience (ARISE) on preferences for a hypothetical beneficial cancer screening test (one that reduces the chance of cancer death or extends life) versus a hypothetical screening test with no proven physical benefits. Method A total of 3386 men and women aged 40 to 70 completed an online survey about prostate or breast cancer screening. Participants were randomly assigned to either an unbeneficial test condition (0 lives saved due to screening) or a beneficial test condition (1 life saved due to screening). Participants then reviewed 4 informational interventions about either breast (women) or prostate (men) cancer screening. First, participants were provided didactic information alongside an explicit recommendation. This was followed by a descriptive harms intervention in which the possible harms of overdetection were explained. Participants then viewed 2 additional interventions: a narrative and ARISE (an intervention in which participants learned about probabilities by viewing simulated outcomes). The order of these last 2 interventions was randomized. Preference for being screened with the test and knowledge about the test were measured. Results With each successive intervention, preferences for screening tests decreased an equivalent amount for both a beneficial and unbeneficial test. Knowledge about the screening tests was largely unimpacted by the interventions. Conclusions Presenting detailed risk and benefit information, narratives, and ARISE reduced preferences for screening regardless of the net public benefit of screening.
Keywords: cancer screening; risk communication; screening preferences; simulated experience (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0272989X211039743 (text/html)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:medema:v:42:y:2022:i:3:p:387-397
DOI: 10.1177/0272989X211039743
Access Statistics for this article
More articles in Medical Decision Making
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().