Treatment vs Quality of Life in Older Patients | Sara Tinsley Vance, PhD, APRN | ASH 2022

Hi, I'm Sarah Tinsley. I work at Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida. I love taking care of patients, and my ASH abstract and poster are based on shared decision making and helping older patients make the best decisions when they're diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia. This idea for research came out of really taking care of patients and listening to them tell me that they're interested in the survival data, but what they really want most is to know how it's going to affect them and really what their quality of life is going to be like. And that's what my poster and abstract are focused on. We know that shared decision making is the center of patient care where the patient understands what they're getting into when they make a decision about their treatment. And many times we have great survival data for various types of AML and for older AML, but what we don't have is quality of life data. And in this abstract and poster, I'm asking patients whether they want improved quality of life, even if their life is shortened, or if they want to have, they want to live, they want to survive longer, even if their quality of life is greatly compromised. And as many of you who take care of patients probably already know, that the majority of patients really wanted improved quality of life over survival. That's what their goals with treatment are. They want to feel better and be able to do the things that are meaningful to them over just living longer and not having a good quality of life. As you can imagine, the most participants in this study were men, white men, and less involvement with women. And I did compare intensive and non-intensive treatment, and you could see that the treatment, there was some discordance between what the patients thought they were signing up for as far as survival or quality of life and the type of treatment received based on survival data. And hopefully my ongoing study looking at the development of a quality of life decision making model will answer that question and help us better align the patient's treatment with their goals. So, thank you.