Knowledge is power, and that is certainly never more true than when it comes to handling health concerns. But a recent study has found that most women who have breast cancer are not actually fully informed or in command of the knowledge about the type of tumor that they actually have.

Different types of tumors have vastly different treatment methods and assumed outcomes upon treating them, so it might be helpful for more people to understand why they are receiving the treatment they have been prescribed.

The study was published in the journal Cancer and evaluated the experiences of 500 women who had been diagnosed with cancer. The chosen women were all located in Northern California, and had been diagnosed between the years of 2010 and 2011.

To see how much the women actually knew about the type of tumor that they had, they were asked questions such as what the grade of their tumor was (or how aggressive it was), the stage of the tumor, and whether their tumor fed off estrogen or off of the protein human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2).

55 percent of the women said they knew if their tumor fed off of estrogen or not, but only 56 percent of them were correct in their answer. 82 percent of the women were confident that they knew the stage of their tumor, and only 57 percent of them were accurate. One third of the women claimed to know the grade of their tumor but only one out of five actually did.

Only 8 percent of all the women surveyed could accurately answer all of the questions about their cancerous tumor. This is itself was notable, but particularly so when it was discovered that there seemed to be a spread in knowledge across ethnicity. Certain ethnic groups were less likely than others to be properly informed about their diagnosis. Minority women were less likely to know the answers about their tumors.

One Dr. Michelle Shayne of the James P. Wilmot Cancer Center at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry in Rochester, who was not involved in the study, seemed to find these finding surprising based on how savvy breast cancer patients tend to be in general.

“Breast cancer patients in general are a very savvy group of individuals. They tend to read a lot and bring a lot of clippings in to their oncologist and ask a lot of questions,” she said.

The findings clearly show that there could be an improvement in communication between oncologists and patients based on their individual cases, and not just on breast cancer in general. With a wide variety of variables it becomes crucial to pin down and point out exactly what is going on in individual cases.

This might mean writing out the details as opposed to just reciting them, so that the patients can have their specific diagnosis in a hard copy to reread when they get home. The women who beat breast cancer should be knowledgeable about what kind they had as well, in case they are ever called upon to fill in details about their medical history.