Old Dominion and Virginia Commonwealth universities will use a $9 million grant to work on and study cancer prevention over the next five years at a new Advancing Cancer Control Equity Research Center.
They’ll focus on neighborhoods with low-income housing in Hampton Roads in Richmond.
“Adults in under-resourced communities are placed at disproportionate risk for cancer, facing a higher incidence of the disease compared to their more affluent counterparts,” ODU and VCU wrote in a release about the Center.
“Despite this alarming trend, there is a significant gap in evidence-based methods to enhance cancer prevention services in these communities. Addressing this disparity is critical to improving health outcomes and reducing cancer rates among vulnerable populations.”
In the first year of the grant, researchers will begin with training Housing and Urban Development staff who manage the communities, the press release says. Other activities will be designed with people living in the neighborhoods.
WHRO’s Mechelle Hankerson spoke with Dr. Brynn Sheehan, the director of Research and Infrastructure Service Enterprise at Virginia Health Sciences at ODU and one of the research leaders at the future center.
This interview was lightly edited for length and clarity.
Mechelle Hankerson: Dr. Sheehan, thanks for joining us today. The future Cancer Control Equity Research Center will focus on cancer prevention services for people living in federally subsidized low income housing in Hampton Roads in Richmond. How is cancer currently impacting that population of people?
Dr. Brynn Sheehan: One of the main projects in this ACCERT Center is to focus on social drivers of health. That's what this project is aiming to do, is to acknowledge that there are systemic barriers that can be changed, hopefully, with multi-level intervention attention.
It's not just your income that is making you at higher risk for certain cancers or certain other diagnoses, even. It's the combination of where you live, income, access to food, access to affordable care, health illiteracy, all of these things are interacting together.
M.H: In addition to helping those folks, is the center hoping to learn anything?
B.S: Absolutely. That's what makes this center and this grant really unique. Normally for a research proposal, you are required to detail about 99% of what you're going to do. This project is so strongly based in community engagement and in community involvement that ideas were outlined, and ideas of interventions that have shown to work in other communities were detailed.
However, we know the details of how it will be implemented [and] maybe some adjustments to the intervention will need to be changed based on the community. So it's a really large community partnership feedback that will actually change some things about these interventions and how they're implemented in order to be the most successful in these communities.
M.H: The announcement of the center talked about addressing social drivers of health like food access and affordability, increasing physical activity and even helping people get access to technology like WiFi hotspots and tablets. How did those things tie to cancer prevention?
B.S: All of them are working together to place some people at higher risk, because nobody lives in a silo with one influence. We're constantly walking around with our genetics influencing us, our decisions influencing us, our community barriers that have been developed and are still in existence influencing us.
For example, one of the interventions with the social drivers of health project, Jessica Larose [a researcher working on the project at VCU] in her work in Petersburg, learned through part of the nutrition and exercise wellness program one of these factors that is successful is walking and it was really well-received in the community. They worked with that community to make it work for them, so that they had walking paths, formed groups – [it was] very successful. That will look very different in the Hampton Roads income-based housing communities.
We know from other research we've done many residents don't even feel comfortable walking a block away from their building. So again, we don't know the details of how this will look now, because we're just beginning to get the feedback from our community members. We're bringing in known, scientifically sound cancer prevention research strategies to communities and adjusting them to meet the needs of the community.
