Communicating information from MRI - patient and parent views v1.0
Research type
Research Study
Full title
What is the impact of showing images from Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) of paediatric brain tumour patients to patients and their families; and how do they understand and interpret these? v1.0
IRAS ID
206497
Contact name
Andrew C Peet
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Birmingham
Clinicaltrials.gov Identifier
N/A, N/A
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 1 months, 18 days
Research summary
In Birmingham Children’s Hospital (BCH) child cancer unit, there are 50 new patients with brain tumours each year, and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is essential to their clinical management. Each patient with brain tumours typically has an MRI scan every three months. The patient (and family) are shown an image or images from their MRI scan during the initial meeting when the diagnosis is discussed, and in subsequent consultations after further MRI scans. Though it is standard practice, the impact and effect of showing scan images of the disease, and its progression, to patients and their families is unknown.
In addition, the time between having a scan and results becoming available also make this potentially stressful for young cancer patients and their families, since the scans might show disease progression and poor prognosis (that treatment was ineffective). Images from MRI are often not straightforward to interpret, even for experts, so it can be particularly stressful for the patient and family to deal with a lot of uncertainties. The situation is further complicated as a result of MRI being a rapidly developing technique, with imaging research continually making more information available.
How young cancer patients and their families understand and make sense of the scan images is not known. It is also unknown how they deal with the uncertainties in interpretation such as whether a preliminary interpretation of the scan with a lower level of accuracy than the final report would be valuable to them, or if the uncertainty would cancel out any benefit.This exploratory study seeks to answer these questions using 30-60 minute semi-structured interviews with young patients (8-18 years) and their parents in order to improve hospital practice. This is funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR).
REC name
West Midlands - Black Country Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
16/WM/0490
Date of REC Opinion
20 Jan 2017
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion