Health Literacy and Cancer Risk Perception: Implications for Genomic Risk Communication

Noel T. Brewer, Janice P. Tzeng, Sarah E. Lillie, Alrick S. Edwards, Jeffrey M. Peppercorn and Barbara K. Rimer
Additional contact information
Noel T. Brewer: University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, ntba@unc.edu
Janice P. Tzeng: University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC
Sarah E. Lillie: University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC
Alrick S. Edwards: University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC
Jeffrey M. Peppercorn: University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC
Barbara K. Rimer: University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC

Medical Decision Making, 2009, vol. 29, issue 2, 157-166

Abstract: Background. As new genomic technology expands the number of medical tests available to physicians and patients, identifying gaps in our understanding of how best to communicate risk is increasingly important. We examined how health literacy informs breast cancer survivors' understanding of and meaning assigned to recurrence risks yielded by genomic tests. Methods. Study participants were posttreatment female breast cancer survivors ( N =163 ) recruited at a university breast cancer clinic. We assessed their health literacy (using REALM) and their interpretation of hypothetical recurrence risk results from a genomic test, presented in several verbal and numerical formats. Analyses controlled for women's objective recurrence risk, age, income, and race. Results. Women with lower health literacy gave higher mean estimates of recurrence risk for a hypothetical group of women with early-stage breast cancer than did women with higher health literacy (52% v. 30%, P

Keywords: risk; relative risk; communication; decision making; Oncotype DX. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0272989X08327111 (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:29:y:2009:i:2:p:157-166

DOI: 10.1177/0272989X08327111

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Medical Decision Making
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().