TUESDAY, Jan. 7, 2025 (HealthDay News) -- Patients have more access to their own medical test results than ever before, thanks to legislation requiring results be released as soon as they’re available.

But that’s not necessarily a good thing, a new study warns.

Many patients are reading test results in their electronic medical record before their doctor has had a chance to go over them, researchers say in a study published Jan. 2 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

This is provoking a lot of confusion and anxiety, mainly because medical reports contain a lot of jargon the average patient doesn’t understand, researchers said.

For example, “a standard pathology report is written by a pathologist for a clinical specialist like a surgeon or a cancer doctor or for other pathologists to read,” lead researcher Dr. Cathryn Lapedis, a pathologist at University of Michigan Health, said in a news release from the college.

To address this, Lapedis and her colleagues tested whether patients might benefit from pathology reports written in a way they would better understand.

“A patient-centered pathology report gives important information on the patient’s diagnosis in a clear format that minimizes medical terminology,” Lapedis said.

“For example, a standard pathology report will include a term like prostatic adenocarcinoma, but the patient-centered report will simply call it prostate cancer."

For the study, researchers recruited more than 2,200 men 55 to 84 with no history of prostate cancer.

These men were provided a hypothetical scenario in which they’d been handed test results from a prostate biopsy they underwent due to troubling urinary symptoms.

Study participants saw one of three types of reports: standard test forms used by either a civilian hospital or a VA hospital, or a report written to be patient-friendly.

From the report, the men were asked to identify their diagnosis, their risk level, and their Gleason score -- a number that reports the aggressiveness of prostate cancer.

“We found that most people cannot get basic information -- like whether or not they have prostate cancer -- from standard pathology reports,” Lapedis said. 

For example, only 39% reading a standard hospital test form could accurately identify that the report showed cancer, results show.

On the other hand, 93% of those who got the patient-centered report accurately identified that the report showed prostate cancer.

This lack of understanding caused some worry among patients who should have had nothing to fear, researchers added.

Patients were more likely to be appropriately worried if they read a patient-friendly report rather than a standard report.

In some cases, patients who read a standard report were very worried even though they had little risk, or weren’t appropriately worried about a high-risk diagnosis, results show.

“We recommend that hospital systems consider including patient-centered pathology reports with standard reports to improve patient understanding,” Lapedis concluded.

The team plans to study the benefits of patient-friendly reports at the University of Michigan.

In the meantime, Lapedis advises patients to talk with their doctors about how to read such a test report before even having the test. That way, they’re prepared to look it over in advance.

More information

The Cleveland Clinic has more on reading medical test results.

SOURCE: University of Michigan, news release, Jan. 3, 2025