South Carolina Cancer Disparities Community Network N's overarching goal is to contribute materially to: understanding the underlying causes of cancer-related health disparities;discovering and developing effective innovations to lower incidence, improving survival, and reducing suffering;delivering these innovations to high-risk populations and moving them to widespread dissemination. We focus on African Americans (AAs) in South Carolina, a group in a region with much higher-than-average cancer incidence and extraordinarily high mortality given incidence. Our goal will be realized by achieving these Specific Aims: 1. to increase the knowledge base needed to understand which biomedical and behavioral procedures are most likely to prevent and control cancer in the high-risk African-American communities in South Carolina;2. to develop and test interventions that are likely to reduce cancer incidence, downstage disease at time of diagnosis, increase longevity, and improve quality of life in people with cancer;3. To deliver interventions shown to be effective to places of greatest receptivity and public health need and to evaluate them in terms of generalizability (i.e., external validity);and 4. To disseminate results from successful interventions in the form of intervention """"""""packages"""""""" within our communities in South Carolina and to work with national partners to determine and distinguish universal elements that will work most (or at least many) places and others that are more place- and culture-specific. The success of SCCDCN-ll is predicated on: strong community support;dedication to the principles of community-based participatory research;understanding that the philosophical underpinnings and practical methods of applying knowledge are essentially the same across interdisciplinary, translational and community-based participatory research;that the tripartite missions of research, education, and service are both inseparable and highly interdependent;and that training of the next generation of scientists dedicated to the highest ideals of community-based participatory, interdisciplinary, and translational research is necessary in order to reduce, and then finally eliminate cancer-related health disparities.
The SCCDCN-ll builds on work begun in CNP-I that allows us to expand programming to reduce, and finally eliminate entirely, cancer-related health disparities. A very favorable alignment of community and academic factors will provide many opportunities to increase the scientific evidence base in this arena and to use our many academic and community assets for junior faculty, and other professional and academic, training.
Showing the most recent 10 out of 54 publications
