Doctors' Understanding of Survival Statistics (MPIB)

Max Planck Institute for Human Development

Status: Completed

Conditions: Screening

Study type: Observational

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT00981019

MPIB-01-SM

Details and patient eligibility

About

The probably most commonly used measure for expressing the pay-offs of early detection and treatment are survival rates. Yet, over time and groups this metric comes with several biases and thus, is not reliable for judging such benefits. Epidemiologists recommend using reduction of disease-specific mortality rates instead, which is unbiased. The purpose of the study is to investigate how primary care physicians understand and use different survival measures for determining the benefit of cancer screening tests.

Enrollment: 778 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 30 to 65 years old

Volunteers: No Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• primary care physicians (internal, general, and family medicine physicians)

Exclusion criteria

• all other types of physicians

Trial design

778 participants in 1 patient group

mortality*incidence*5-year survival*early stage

Description:

Physicians will be faced in scenarios about screening with information on mortality and 5-year survival, followed by information on mortality\*incidence and 5-year survival\*early stage in a random order.