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 Often, doctors can recommend a clearly preferable treatment. But
sometimes, the study's lead author pointed out, parents may need to
decide things like whether their child should take part in a
clinical trial, or whether the child should have surgery.
Parents may feel as if they have no control when their child is
first diagnosed with cancer, and making decisions about treatment is
the one thing they can do, said Dr. Jennifer Mack, a pediatric
oncologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Boston Children's
Hospital.
"We wanted to try to understand what parents experience and when
they look back on their decisions, how they feel about them," she
said.
Mack and her colleagues surveyed 346 parents of children with cancer
at two U.S. medical centers (one parent per family). The parents
completed the surveys within 12 weeks after the cancer was
diagnosed.
Fifty-four parents, or 16 percent, had a high level of regret about
their decisions, the researchers report in the Journal of Clinical
Oncology.
About a third did not regret their decisions and would make the same
choices again, and 45 percent had mild regret, the researchers
found.
Communication factors were tied to how parents felt about their
decisions. Parents were less likely to feel regret if they reported
receiving high-quality information, detailed information about
prognosis, trusting their child's doctor or being comfortable in
their decision-making role.
Blacks, Hispanics and other non-white parents were also more likely
to experience a high level of regret than white parents, the
researchers found.
Even when communication was similar for white parents and parents of
other races, the non-white parents still felt more regret, Mack
said.
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"There are probably other factors at work for racial and minority
families that we need to work to understand," she said.
It's important to do more research and understand these connections
to make the process better, said Mack.
The researchers caution that the tool used to measure regret tends
to lump parents without strong feelings into the high regret
category. Mack also said they didn't account for the children's
roles in treatment decisions.
She said it's important for parents to have ongoing conversations
with their children's doctors and not feel rushed or pressured into
decisions.
"Sometimes there is urgency, but often there is time to keep having
these discussions," said Mack. "Parents should feel empowered to do
that."
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2cnpaJm Journal of Clinical Oncology, online
September 12, 2016.
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