Table 2.

Role of patient preferences and beliefs in receipt of chemotherapy (n=409^*).

	Total	No chemotherapy		Received chemotherapy		p-valueˆ
	n	n	%	n	%
If you had to make a choice now, would you prefer treatment that extends life as much as possible, even if it means having more pain and discomfort, or would you want treatment that focuses on relieving pain and discomfort as much as possible, even if it means not living as long?						<0.001
Relieve pain or discomfort as much as possible	164	17	10	147	90
Extend life as much as possible	204	2	1	202	99
Declined to answer/ Don’t know	39	1	3	38	97
Missing response	2	2	100	0	0
If you had to make a choice now, would you prefer treatment that extends life as much as possible, even if it means using up all of your financial resources, or would you want treatment that costs you less, even if means not living as long?						0.103
Prefer treatment that costs less	110	8	7	102	93
Prefer treatment to extend life at the risk of using all financial resources	245	8	3	237	97
Declined to answer/ Don’t know	52	4	8	48	92
Missing response	2	2	100	0	0
After talking with your doctors about chemotherapy, how likely did you think it was that chemotherapy would help you live longer						0.008
Not likely/ A little likely	29	3	10	26	90
Somewhat likely/Very likely	337	3	1	334	99
Not applicable/Don’t know	20	1	5	19	95
Missing response	23	15	65	8	35
After talking with your doctors about chemotherapy, how likely did you think it was that chemotherapy would help you with problems you were having because of your [cancer]?						<0.001
Not likely/A little likely	38	4	11	34	89
Somewhat likely/Very likely	261	0	0	261	100
Not applicable/Don’t know	87	3	3	84	97
Missing response	23	15	65	8	35

^*Limited to survey responses from full patient survey or full surrogate survey for living patients, since items of interest were only asked in these survey versions.

^ˆTwo-sided Fisher’s exact test excluding missing responses, “not applicable,” or “Don’t know.”