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Cancer experts at the University schools of medicine and public health have
been selected to participate in a new $34 million national study measuring the
quality of care cancer patients receive across the United States and how
patients do following treatment.
"This project, which is being funded by the National Cancer Institute after a
stiff nationwide competition, will involve UNC and five other U.S. medical
centers as study sites," said Robert S. Sandler, professor of medicine and
epidemiology. "We'll follow 1,000 newly diagnosed colon cancer patients for
five years, and the others will follow more than 9,000 other patients with
either lung or colon cancer."
Sandler, co-director of the Center for Gastrointestinal Biology and Disease and
a member of the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, will serve as principal
investigator for the effort in North Carolina.
Collaborating centers will collect identical information about what happens to
patients and pool the data to make it more useful, he said. They also will
pursue special projects of their own design.
At the Carolina site, researchers also will look specifically at "functional
health literacy" -- how people's literacy affects their health.
"Our hypothesis is that people who can't read and can't understand written
information given to them by physicians or hospitals might not be able to
negotiate the medical system and not do as well," Sandler said.
University investigators also will collect blood samples and tumor tissue from
patients to learn if biological factors influence how patients fare, he said.
Besides Sandler, Joel E. Tepper, Marci K. Campbell, John T. Woosley, Morris
Weinberger and others will participate in the project, called "Cancer Care
Outcomes Research and Surveillance Consortium (CanCORS). Respectively, they are
faculty members in radiation oncology, nutrition, pathology and health policy
and administration.
Researchers will obtain names of colon cancer patients in 22 central N.C.
counties and invite them to participate. Those who agree will be followed
closely over the five years to learn what happens to them following treatment
by their personal doctors. Smoking history, weight, diet, physical activity
levels and medications taken all will be examined along with other patient
characteristics and experiences.
"We'll learn quite a lot from this study, including whether being poor, living
in rural areas or being a minority affects how patients do with either of these
two important cancers," Sandler said. "Of special interest to us will be
patients' survival and quality of life. We believe our pooled results
eventually could improve both."
Carolina's share of the grant will total about $3.5 million. Other
participating institutions are the Dana Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard
Medical School, both in Boston, the universities of Iowa and Alabama and RAND
Health in Santa Monica, Calif.
The Farber institute will receive a larger share of the grant because, besides
serving as a clinical center, it also will operate the study's statistical
coordinating center to gather and analyze all the data.
First results of the study are expected to appear in five years, Sandler
said.
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