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Julia Brettschneider (Department of Statistics)

Decision-making biases in cancer treatment decisions involving complex risk information.

Recent developments in medical genomics include refined prognostic tests about cancer recurrence risk. This information can be used to support decisions about adjuvant treatment in cancer patients. Such decisions involve a number of delicate trade-offs including certain costs now versus other costs later, and short-term quality of life versus potential increase of total years of survival. However, such test results come with uncertainty on a number of levels, potentially with a high degree. In addition, the risk information remains a black box for both patients and health care professionals. We analyse the treatment decision-making process with a particular emphasis on deviations from normative risk processing due to the impact of emotions, attitudes, intangible facts etc.