• Luke T Ingersoll, Stewart C Alexander, Susan Ladwig, Wendy Anderson, Sally A Norton, and Robert Gramling.
• Department of Consumer Science, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN.
• Psychooncology. 2019 Jun 1; 28 (6): 1286-1292.

ObjectiveClinicians frequently overestimate survival time among seriously ill patients, and this can result in medical treatment at end of life that does not reflect the patient's preferences. Little is known, however, about the sources of clinicians' optimistic bias in survival estimation. Related work in social networks and experimental psychology demonstrates that psychological states-such as optimism-can transfer from one person to another.MethodsWe directly observed and audio recorded 189 initial inpatient palliative care consultations among hospitalized patients with advanced cancer. Patients self-reported their level of trait optimism and expectations for survival prognosis prior to the palliative care consultation, and the palliative care clinicians rated their expectations for the patient's survival time following the initial conversation with the patient. We followed patient mortality for 6 months.ResultsPatient optimism was associated with clinician overestimation of their survival in a dose-response relationship. Clinicians were approximately three times as likely to overestimate the survival of patients endorsing both high trait optimism and optimistic ratings of their survival time compared with neither (OR: 2.95; 95% CI: 1.24-7.02). This association was not attenuated by adjustment for age, gender, race, ethnicity, education, income, cancer type, functional status, quality of life, or white blood cell count (ORadj : 3.45; 95% CI: 1.24-9.66).ConclusionPatients' optimism may have some influence over their clinicians' prognostic judgments.© 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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