What patients want to know about disease and treatment

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8240 Background: Treatment of metastatic carcinomas is accompanied with disturbing facts about disease and treatment, therefore many doctors as well as patients, prefers “not-to-tell if not-asked” and vice versa attitude. Also, communication with patients is complicated because little is known about what patients actually wants to know about disease and treatment. To improve communication with patients, we have conducted a survey with primary aim to determine how well our patients are informed and which information they find to be most useful. Also, age related differences are analyzed. Methods: The self-designed questioner (18 questions) is distributed among 200 hospitalized patients at the medical oncology department. Patients were stratified according to gender, age and education. Results: There were 99 females, 101 males; 31% of patients are elderly (>60 yrs, median 67). Age related differences were most prominent. Elderly patients are most interested about treatment duration (79%), less for side effects (40%), and the rate of treatment failure (30%).Younger patients are almost equally interested for all treatment aspects. 52% elderly patients, think that information about rate of expected response is not useful at all, as compared to 28% of younger; 93% elderly would prefer verbal information rather that written inform consent (only 7%); 72% of younger patients prefers verbal information, 21% would like to get all informing options (verbal, written, internet); 15% of elderly don't know any relevant information about diseases (as compared to 1% of younger patients); 59% of the elderly were not informed about the side effects of the treatment (25 % of younger). None of the elderly patients claimed to be disinterested to get more information about disease and treatment (7,5% of younger). Conclusions: Majority of patients are most interested about treatment duration, side effects of treatment, and rate of therapy failure. Elderly patients were clearly less informed about all aspects of the planed treatment. However, it seems that elderly patients are at least equally interested about disease and treatment and prefer rather verbal communication with the doctors, than written information. No significant financial relationships to disclose.