Patient involvement in the choice between surgery and radiation for prostate cancer: what about regret?

For primary localized prostate cancer different treatment options are available. The most frequently applied treatments are radical prostatectomy, external beam radiation therapy and brachytherapy. These treatments yield comparable results for tumor control, but they differ strongly in the procedure and their profile of side effects. The effect of involving patients into this treatment choice by means of a decision aid is the topic of this study.

We hypothesise that regret is affected by adverse outcomes of the cancer treatment and not by patient involvement in the treatment choice.

- Baseline (before information on treatments)

- Pre-treatment (after information)

- 6 months after treatment choice

- 12 months after treatment choice

The control group will receive usual care, i.e. the physician will discuss the options with the patients.

The intervention group will receive usual care plus structured information on the risks and benefits of the different treatment options by means of a purpose-built decision aid (DA) presented by a researcher. The use of DAs has been shown to increase the level of patient participation in treatment decisions.