• The role of decision aids in personalized cancer medicine
  • Zohreh Javanmard,1 Reza Safdari,2 Marzieh Esmaeili,3,*
    1. Department of health information management, School of Allied Medical Sciences, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran
    2. Department of health information management, School of Allied Medical Sciences, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran
    3. Department of health information management, School of Allied Medical Sciences, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran


  • Introduction: Personalized medicine is a new and evolving branch of medical sciences that customizes and individualizes care methods based on the genetic, clinical, behavioral, physiological and environmental information and characteristics of individuals. Medical guidelines and decisions also tend to be personalized in this arena. In order for this, Decision Aid systems (DAs) enable patients to make informed decisions by providing information about different choices and their advantages and disadvantages, thereby personalizing different choices of patients according to their clinical circumstances. As the treatment and prevention methods for some cancers might vary according to the patient's condition, the use of the mentioned systems is of interest for this kind of disease. Therefore, the present review was conducted to investigate the existing DAs in the field of personalized cancer medicine and their applications.
  • Methods: In this review, three search engines including PubMed, Web of Science and Google Scholar were searched using the keywords comprising "Decision Aid", "Personalized Medicine" and "Cancer" alongside their synonyms. Due to the novelty of this topic, the search results were limited to English papers published during the years between 2009 and 2019. After excluding duplicate and irrelevant papers, the rest were examined.
  • Results: Twenty-two articles including 10 personalized decision aid systems for breast (5), prostate (3), lung (1) and colorectal (1) cancers were selected. These systems had been mostly used in the areas of screening, treatment and prevention. 80% of the results, which had online access, were used to assess the risk of falling ill with or the relapse of diseases. In all of the studies, the treatment recommendations given to patients and the choices they had made were based on their individual characteristics and conditions. The most important benefits of using the DAs mentioned in the articles are improving decision making, reducing decision conflict, facilitating patient-centered care, activating patient participation in the decision-making process and – equally important – empowering the patient.
  • Conclusion: Personalized Decision Aids (PDAs) in cancer medicine can help individuals make informed decisions based on their clinical and environmental conditions as well as their individual values and priorities. Therefore, using these systems will be effective in improving the quality of care services.
  • Keywords: Decision aids, Informed choice, Cancer, Personalized medicine