AN EMPIRICAL-APPROACH TO INFORMED CONSENT IN OVARIAN-CANCER

The study was designed to define and compare the professional and the reasonable-person standards for provision of information to ovarian ca ncer patients, and to determine if patient information priorities coul d be anticipated by surrogate patients. Physicians treating ovarian ca ncer patients, women treated for the disease, and well lay women imagi ning themselves to have the disease used a visual analog scale to judg e the importance of 57 questions that they might want answered before treatment decisions are made. On the basis of median importance scores , all groups judged questions relating to life expectancy as most impo rtant. Overall, judgments of the patient groups agreed well with one a nother; doctor-patient agree ment was significant but smaller than bet ween patient agreement. Predicting an individual's judgments from his/ her group, however, was very poor for all groups. Life experience and demographic characteristics rarely improved our ability to predict an individual's judgments.