The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has awarded a three-year, $900,000 grant to a School of Nursing-led multidisciplinary team that will develop methods to increase cancer screening by young breast cancer survivors and their high-risk female relatives.
The project director is Maria Katapodi, assistant professor at the School of Nursing and a Robert Wood Johnson Nurse Faculty Scholar. In addition to the School of Nursing, collaborators on the project include the School of Public Health and the Comprehensive Cancer Center at the Medical School, the Prevention Research Center of Michigan, the Michigan Department of Community Health and the Michigan Cancer Consortium.
“This collaboration clearly links the research that is being conducted at the University of Michigan by Dr. Katapodi and her team to state officials who have the ability to readily disseminate these findings through the public health system,” says team member and School of Nursing professor Laurel Northouse.
The project proposal, submitted in response to a call for Special Interest Projects put forward by the CDC-funded Prevention Research Center of Michigan, was the only proposal in the country selected for funding.
“Since this specific SIP was only funding one proposal in the whole U.S., we didn’t think we were going to get it,” Katapodi says. “It was a very pleasant surprise.”
Using data from the Cancer Registry, Katapodi and her fellow researchers will identify 3,000 women in Michigan, between the ages of 20 and 45, who have been diagnosed with breast cancer. Diagnosis during this premenopausal age range classifies the disease as high-risk and indicates that there is most likely a strong hereditary component in the cancer.
Next, the research team will survey the women via mail to ascertain their knowledge of the disease, their strategies for managing cancer risk, and whether they would be willing to act as advocates for their high-risk family members.
“While breast cancer may, in fact, run in families, family members of breast cancer patients often do not participate in screening for early detection of breast cancer, which can enhance survival,” says Sonia Duffy, an associate professor at the School of Nursing. “Therefore outreach to family members of breast cancer patients is needed.”
The team will then collect information from the women who agree to participate, in order to identify who in their families potentially are at high risk for breast cancer.
“I’m interested in looking at family history as the most effective and cheapest method of risk assessment for all chronic diseases, not just for cancer,” she says. “Getting families talking about their health history is the first step for clinicians to get the information they need.”
“This (research) has major policy implications because it represents the next level of trying to bring genetic information to people who do not have this access,” Katapodi says. “We’re in the unique position to bridge the gap between the people in the labs who generate the knowledge about the contribution of genetic factors in common chronic diseases and the public.”
