(Borganic.org)
University of Kentucky researchers plan to spend the next five years trying to prevent cervical cancer and certain other cancers that attack many residents across southeastern Kentucky.
The effort will be funded through a grant from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that's expected to provide $800,000 to $1 million annually over the five years. It is a continuation of an earlier grant from the CDC, officials said.
During the project, health workers would try to prevent cancers by encouraging rural residents to use more cancer-preventing vaccines or change lifestyle behaviors that can cause some cancers. Researchers acknowledged, however, that changing lifestyle habits is one of the hardest tasks in medicine.
A secondary goal will be to catch cancers before they become too advanced to treat, said Dr. Richard Crosby, an associate professor of health behavior at UK.
Crosby will lead the project, along with Dr. Baretta Casey, director of UK's Center for Excellence in Rural Health at Hazard.
Researchers hope that lessons learned from the five-year project could be applied in other areas around the country.
Cutting-edge cancer treatments are more available than ever in Kentucky's rural areas. But prevention could be an even more promising approach, Crosby said.
"Our goal really is to prevent cancer through changes in behavior that can make a big difference over the entire population of people who live in that part of Kentucky," Crosby said.
"We'll do all we can with a few cancers; I think cervical cancer probably will be our main priority."
Other target cancers probably would include colorectal cancer, lung cancer and breast cancer, project organizers said.
Kentucky's Appalachian area traditionally has had overall cancer rates that are higher than in other parts of the state and above national averages.
Crosby said the attack on cervical cancer would focus on trying to get more southeastern Kentucky women to receive the new vaccine that combats the sexually transmitted virus that causes cervical cancer.
Unfortunately, he said, relatively few young women in the area are getting the vaccine now — even when it's available free.
Crosby noted that while it's expensive to treat cancer, prevention often is simple and cheap. These also are things the new project would stress, he said.
"Take, for example, colo rectal cancer," he said. "It is caused to some degree by eating a lot of fatty food, especially red meat. Lack of exercise also seems to contribute. So, there are two behaviors that can be altered in order to prevent a cancer that is all too often deadly."
The CDC grant will be used to establish a Rural Cancer Research Center in Hazard. The center will cover a 23-county area. Health workers from the center would reach out across the area to form partnerships with local communities to promote cancer prevention and early diagnosis, officials said.
"We feel that working with the community and having the community advocate for behavior change can lead to an active form of prevention," Crosby said.
The project is to get under way in October, and officials hope to have local prevention partnerships formed by next spring.
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