UAMS and ACRC Receive $298,080 from Komen Breast Cancer Foundation
| LITTLE ROCK – The University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) and the Arkansas Cancer Research Center (ACRC) at UAMS have received two grants worth $298,080 from the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.
A two-year, $248,480 research grant will support development of a program to promote cancer screening for Latinas, modeled on the cancer center’s successful Witness Project for African-American women. The second grant, $49,600, will support the 2003 National Witness Project Annual Meeting for Education and Networking (AMEN), enabling representatives of the 33 Witness Projects in 22 states to meet in Little Rock.
ACRC Cancer Education Director Deborah O. Erwin, Ph.D., a medical anthropologist, and Thea Spatz, Ed.D., a certified health educator at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, co-founded The Witness Project in 1990. This program is a culturally competent, community-based cancer education program. Through the project, cancer survivors and lay health advisors increase awareness, knowledge, screening and early detection behaviors in the rural and lower-income African-American population in an effort to reduce the mortality and morbidity from cancer.
“Although the incidence rates of breast cancer are somewhat lower for Latinas than Anglo women, Latinas have traditionally been more likely to have larger tumors or cancer that spreads to other parts of the body or both at the time of diagnosis,” Erwin explained. “Moreover, although the mammography use rate for Latinas in the southwestern United States is increasing, Latina screening rates are still significantly lower than those of Caucasian, non-Hispanic women.
“Many of the barriers to cancer screening – such as fear, fatalism and powerlessness – are similar for Latina and African-American women. Therefore, the goal of our research is to investigate the feasibility of developing a Witness Project that is tailored to the cultural and spiritual beliefs of Latinas. We will gather information from Latinas from Mexico, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic to discover which components of The Witness Project are useful and which ones need to be changed to best reach other Latinas and increase their screening behaviors.”
Colleagues working on the Latina Witness Project grant include Lina Jandorf at the Derald H. Ruttenberg Cancer Center at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York and Ruben Arana with the Hispanic Health Program in Little Rock. While the participating Arkansas facilities can draw data from a large Mexican population in a primarily rural state, the Ruttenberg Cancer Center is in an urban area where the country’s largest Puerto Rican and Dominican Republic populations are found.
According to Erwin, the research plan will incorporate interviews and focus groups to document the necessary program changes and then will test these changes by training local Latina survivors and lay health advisors to conduct the outreach programs in Spanish in a few local churches. Additional revisions will be made and documented so that effective manuals and materials in Spanish can be developed by the end of the research project.
Women who attend the new Latina outreach programs in the churches will be asked to complete a brief survey before the program to assess their current screening and knowledge about breast cancer and then will be contacted by telephone to ask them about this information after the program. This approach will be used to test if the program was helpful to them and if it actually encouraged them to get mammograms.
Overall, the proposed research will develop an improved outreach intervention for Latinas that 1.) adds a more spiritual component to the educational messages; 2.) provides cancer survivors as visible role models for early detection; and 3.) provides a way to inform males in the Latino community about breast health.
The other recently awarded Komen Foundation grant – a conference grant worth $49,600 – will support the 2003 National Witness Project Annual Meeting for Education and Networking (AMEN). The grant will enable representatives of the 33 Witness Project sites in 22 states to assemble in Little Rock by paying for their travel and program expenses.
The Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation is a nonprofit organization that was founded in 1982 by Nancy Brinker to honor the memory of her sister, Susan G. Komen, who died of breast cancer at the age of 36. The foundation is credited as one of the nation’s leading catalysts in the fight against breast cancer.