Abstract
e19572 Background: The attitudes of Nigerian cancer patients on cancer diagnosis and prognosis were studied to ascertain what diagnostic and prognostic information were disclosed to them by their physicians, and what they wanted to know about their cancer diagnosis and prognosis. Methods: Structured questionnaires were administered on all consenting cancer patients that were managed at the University of Nigeria Teaching Hospital Enugu (UNTH-E) between July and October 2011. The data collected were analyzed with Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) software version 18. Results: Two hundred and forty four (244) patients participated in the study. While 95% of the participants wanted to know the nature of their diagnosis, only76.7% admitted to being informed of the diagnosis by their doctors. Nearly 54% of participants will like to be informed of a bad prognosis when death is imminent. The word “cancer” was used to disclose the diagnosis to 69.4% of the patients. Hundred and eight (44.3%) of the patients did not have any idea what “cancer” meant or did not know how to explain it while 39.8% knew it as a deadly, incurable or a painful disease and 8.6% described it as a tumour or abnormal growth. The nature of the disease was explained to 155(66.0%) of the patients among whom 114(76%) felt they received adequate or more than adequate explanation of their cancer to enable them undergo treatment. Patient factors that significantly improved the disclosure of diagnostic information were education (p=0.044) and site of the cancer (p=0.043). There was no statistically significant association between the desire for diagnostic and prognostic information and the patients’ age, gender, educational attainment or site of the cancer. Conclusions: Most of the surveyed cancer patients in Nigeria desire to know the truth about the diagnosis of their disease and more than 50% of them desire to know when the cancer stage becomes terminal and death imminent. Physicians in Nigeria should consider the information needs of the individual patients and satisfy them.
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