Operating on Anxiety: Negative Affect toward Breast Cancer and Choosing Contralateral Prophylactic Mastectomy.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Rates of contralateral prophylactic mastectomy (CPM)-removal of the healthy breast following breast cancer diagnosis-have increased, particularly among women for whom CPM provides no survival benefit. Affective (i.e., emotional) decision making is often blamed for this increase. We studied whether greater negative breast cancer affect could motivate uptake of CPM through increased cancer risk perceptions and biased treatment evaluations.

Methods

We randomly assigned healthy women with average breast-cancer risk (N = 1030; M_age = 44.14, SD = 9.23 y) to 1 of 3 affect conditions (negative v. neutral v. positive narrative manipulation) in a hypothetical online experiment in which they were asked to imagine being diagnosed with cancer in one breast. W

SUBMITTER: Silverstein MC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9898882 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature