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. 2022 Jun;193(2):293-303.
doi: 10.1007/s10549-022-06549-9. Epub 2022 Mar 13.

Health care professionals overestimate the risk for locoregional recurrences after breast cancer treatment depending on their specialty

Jet W Ankersmid #  1   2 , Pauline E R Spronk #  3 , Anneke M Zeillemaker  3 , Sabine Siesling  4   5
Affiliations

Health care professionals overestimate the risk for locoregional recurrences after breast cancer treatment depending on their specialty

Jet W Ankersmid et al. Breast Cancer Res Treat. 2022 Jun.

Abstract

Purpose: For the implementation of personalised surveillance, it is important to create more awareness among HCPs with regard to the risk for locoregional recurrences (LRRs). The aim of this study is to evaluate the current awareness and estimations of individual risks for LRRs after completion of primary treatment for breast cancer among health care professionals (HCPs) in the Netherlands, without using any prediction tools.

Methods: A cross-sectional survey was performed among 60 HCPs working in breast cancer care in seven Dutch hospitals and 25 general practitioners (GPs). The survey consisted of eleven realistic surgically treated breast cancer cases. HCPs were asked to estimate the 5-year risk for LRRs for each case, which was compared to the estimations by the INFLUENCE-nomogram using one-sample Wilcoxon tests. Differences in estimations between HCPs with different specialities were determined using Kruskal-Wallis tests and Dunn tests.

Results: HCPs tended to structurally overestimate the 5-year risk for LRR on each case. Average overestimations ranged from 4.8 to 26.1%. Groups of HCPs with varying specialities differed significantly in risk estimations. GPs tended to overestimate the risk for LRRs on average the most (15.0%) and medical oncologists had the lowest average overestimation (2.7%).

Conclusions: It is important to create more awareness of the risk for LRRs, which is a pre-requisite for the implementation of personalised surveillance after breast cancer. Besides education for HCPs, the use of prediction models such as the INFLUENCE-nomogram can support in estimating an objective estimate of each individual patient's risk.

Keywords: Breast cancer; Health care providers; Recurrence; Risk; Surveillance.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Estimated 5-year risks for locoregional recurrences on all cases
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Average overestimations for all cases per specialty
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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