Brief Description:

The National Cancer Institute's Center to Reduce Cancer Health Disparities hosted the 2008 Cancer Health Disparities Summit.

Transcript:

Akinso: The National Cancer Institute's Center to Reduce Cancer Health Disparities hosted the 2008 Cancer Health Disparities Summit.

Warne: The theme this year is eliminating cancer health disparities through science, training, and community.

Akinso: Dr. Donald Warne is the Health Policy Research Director for Intertribal Council of Arizona and a NCI grantee.

Underwood: Most of the topics discussed are around the top 5 cancers that have the highest disparity issues.

Akinso: Dr. Willie Underwood is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Urology at Wayne State University of Medicine and also a NCI grantee.

Underwood: One is prostate cancer, secondly is lung and bronchus cancer, breast cancer, colorectal cancer, and pancreatic cancer.

Akinso: The Summit was held from July 14th–July 16th. It highlighted the science of the programs and grantees funded through the Center to Reduce Cancer Health Disparities. Dr. Underwood talks about the impact of cancer health disparities in the African American community.

Underwood: We know that deaths from all cancers combined for both men and women are high among blacks. African American women who are diagnosed with breast cancer are less likely than white women to survive five years after diagnosis. The rate among African American women is 71 percent compared to 86 percent and that's for survival of breast cancer for whites. African American males have far higher death rates of prostate cancer, 2.4 times higher. The incidences of colorectal cancer among African American women are higher than that among whites. Lung cancer is the leading cause of death for African Americans when you look at cancers death.

Akinso: Dr. Warne talks about how it impacts the Native American community.

Warne: If you look nationally our most common cancers are lung, bronchus cancer, but also prostate, colon rectum cancer, kidney and renal pelvis cancer and stomach cancer. But we see tremendous variation. Some regions of the country have much lower rates of one cancer than others primarily due the rates of cigarette smoking.

Akinso: Dr. Warne explains how this summit benefits Native Americans and other groups.

Warne: One of the major benefits of the summit is to find out what other populations are doing. I think that projects like ours-that is a community network program. We will benefit tremendously by learning what other programs are doing, what other populations are doing, what other communities are doing. And when we share information in a forum like this we learn from each other and perhaps there's templates of projects or even ideas that we haven't thought about that we can try to implement in Indian country.

Akinso: Both Dr. Warne and Dr. Underwood cite that the goal of the summit was to enhance mutually beneficial interactions among the Center to Reduce Cancer Health Disparities programs by sharing scientific knowledge, encouraging junior investigators, and broadening community participation. This is Wally Akinso at the National Institutes of Health Bethesda, Maryland.