The comparative effectiveness of decision aids in diverse populations with early stage prostate cancer: a study protocol for a cluster-randomized controlled trial in the NCI Community Oncology Research Program (NCORP), Alliance A191402CD

Abstract

Identifying a course of treatment that accords with patient goals and preferences for cancer control while attending to important quality of life trade-offs is crucial to minimizing the overall burden of the prostate cancer. [...]prostate cancer treatment provides a crucial opportunity for patients and clinicians to engage in shared decision-making. [25] Shared decision-making tools may enable deliberation about treatment choices in contexts where cultural differences and social determinants of health complicate fully ascertaining patient preferences. Because choosing the right treatment in prostate cancer is so challenging, it requires high quality conversations. Because communication breakdowns may be to blame for documented disparities in the provision of prostate cancer treatments to minorities—particularly African American and American Indian men—we designed this study to test known methods of improving conversations between clinicians and patients in a trial that seeks to preferentially enroll minority men confronted with a new diagnosis of prostate cancer. Under a similar alternative, the same can be said for the during-consultation Prostate Choice decision aid. [...]if patients within each site were not correlated with each other, our target sample size would be 100 patients.