Making Effective Nutritional Choices for Cancer Prevention (MENU)

By definition, health maintenance organizations (HMOs) are committed to promoting healthy lifestyle behaviors that decrease risk for chronic disease, including cancer. Self-help booklets, guides, and pamphlets are routinely disseminated to group members, but these generic "one-size-fits-all" materials have a low impact on behavior change. Treatment materials are more effective when tailored to the characteristics of an individual person. Expanding use of the Internet has made it easier than ever to develop and disseminate personally-tailored cancer prevention materials, but little is known about how well these treatments work if delivered over the Web. Given the potential advantages of web-delivered treatment (e.g., capacity for dynamic, interactive communications; 24 hour treatment access when desired; access to treatment from multiple environments such as home and office, etc.) this issue warrants further research.

The purpose of this study is to develop and evaluate an individually-tailored, web-based program to promote daily fruit and vegetable consumption. The project will proceed in three phases. Phases I and II will be used to collect focus group information and pilot test the web-based treatment program. In Phase III we will conduct a randomized, multi-site trial to test the efficacy of the intervention. Participants will be recruited from four geographically diverse HMO's around the country. The specific aims of this project are to:

1. Determine whether web-based tailored information is more efficacious in improving the daily intake of fruits and vegetables than web-based untailored information;
2. Determine whether web-based tailored information combined with a tailored human online behavioral interaction (HOBI) delivered via email is more efficacious in improving the daily intake of fruits and vegetables than web-based untailored information;
3. Determine whether web-based tailored information combined with HOBI is more efficacious in improving the daily intake of fruits and vegetables than web-based tailored information; and,
4. Determine whether baseline stage of change, family history of cancer, age, gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status impact the response to the interventions deployed in Aims 1-3.

Project Status: This study was funded as part of the CRN Competing Continuation (Ed Wagner, PI). The project began March 1, 2003 and is currently in Phase I development. The grant is scheduled to end 2/28/2007. Project Leader is Christine Johnson, PhD, from Henry Ford Health System.

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