Patients' decision-making in radiation oncology

Recently, growing attention has been devoted to developing patient decision aids and decisional support interventions to aid patients in their decision-making when making treatment choices in oncology. Treatment discussions are challenging, both for physicians to transfer medical information to patients, and for patients to conceptualize these risks and benefits and to form a treatment decision. This article provides an overview of the recent literature on decision-making preferences, treatment preferences and decisional support development in radiation oncology. We review the findings from studies that were conducted in radiation oncology that investigated patients' preferences for radical or palliative radiotherapy across all cancer sites and discuss the challenges of transferring medical information to patients.