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Purpose: Imagine you have a 6% chance of developing cancer. A medication can reduce your risk of cancer to 3%, but it has serious side effects. Would you take the medication? Now, imagine that you just learned that the average person’s risk of cancer was 3% and their risk of cancer would drop to 1.5% if they took the medication. Would this information change your preference for the medication? Should it change your preference? This study tested whether attitudes toward taking cancer prevention drugs change when people know how their risk of cancer compares to an average person.
Method: 504 women were randomly assigned to receive one of four hypothetical scenarios in which they imagined that their risk of developing breast cancer in the next 5 years was 6%. Three survey versions differed only in whether the average woman's risk of breast cancer was said to be the same as the respondent’s (6%), lower (3%), or higher (12%), while the fourth group did not receive comparative information. All respondents were told about a pill that could reduce their risk of breast cancer by 50%, although the pill has some serious side effects. Respondents answered questions about their attitudes toward breast cancer and the cancer reducing pill.
Results: When told their risk of breast cancer was higher than the average woman's, women were more worried about breast cancer (p<.02), expressed greater desire to take a the pill (p=.003), and perceived the risk reduction caused by the pill to be more significant (p<.01) than women described as average risk or below average risk for breast cancer. Women who did not see average risk information behaved similarly to those at average or below average risk. Most women perceived being able to compare their risk to that of the average women as being helpful.
Conclusions: Providing comparative risk information can significantly influence people's decisions about prevention strategies. If a prevention strategy reduces a person's risk by half, it should not matter whether others receive greater or lesser benefit from the same strategy, yet this knowledge changes behavior. This tendency of people to focus on comparative, rather than absolute, benefit occurs in many contexts and has implications for clinical practice and research (including design of decision aids).
See more of Oral Concurrent Session B - Methods in Judgment and Decision Making
See more of The 26th Annual Meeting of the Society for Medical Decision Making (October 17-20, 2004)