Recently by Katrina Burton

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates obesity to be a contributing factor to millions of dollars in health care costs and anywhere from 100,000 to 400,000 deaths a year. Easy access to less healthy foods such as fast food has helped widen the gap between ethnic groups when it comes to body mass index (BMI), according to researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

A study, published this week in the American Journal of Public Health, found African-American adults living close to a fast food restaurant are more likely to have a higher BMI than those living farther away. The study also found that those living within 2 miles of a fast food restaurant with income of $40,000 or less were strongly associated with having a higher BMI.

A person is considered overweight with a BMI between 25 and 29, and considered obese with a measurement of 30 and over. Current research shows that African-Americans experience the highest rate of obesity with 38.8 percent of black men being obese and 58.5 percent of black women being obese.

"In fact, African-American women have the highest rates of obesity compared to Caucasians and Hispanics in the U.S.," said Lorraine Reitzel, Ph.D., assistant professor in MD Anderson's Department of Health Disparities Research and lead investigator on the study. 

Smoking remains the leading cause of preventable illness and death in the United States, so the health benefits of quitting are substantial. The majority of smokers are motivated to quit and more than half of all smokers attempt to quit each year. Sadly, only a small minority succeeds.

 

Researchers at MD Anderson are working to change this by changing the culture of how they reach self-admitted smokers with a new approach aimed at connecting through family practice clinics.

 

A collaboration involving MD Anderson researchers, the Texas Quitline and Kelsey-Seybold Clinics targeted smokers and their enrollment in tobacco treatment programs by directly connecting smokers with cessation quit lines.

 

Ask-Advise-Connect

 

Ask-Advise-Connect, a new approach designed to efficiently link smokers with cessation treatment, showed a significant increase in tobacco treatment enrollment by smokers who were directly contacted by quit line staff, according to results published online today in JAMA Internal Medicine. 

 

JAMA published a video interview Feb. 27 with study principal investigator Jennifer Irvin Vidrine, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Health Disparities Research at MD Anderson.

 

Trusting neighbors and community may aid smoking cessation in African-American smokers, accordingly to a study published in the Annals of Behavioral Medicine, a publication of the Society of Behavioral Medicine.

MD Anderson researchers collected data from 397 African-Americans seeking treatment to quit smoking to determine if there was a significant relationship between social cohesion and smoking cessation. The study examined if social cohesion -- the self-reported connectedness and trust felt between neighbors -- was directly linked to smoking abstinence in African-American smokers actively trying to quit, and if psychosocial mediators played a role in those relations.

"We know from previous research that despite later smoking initiation and a lower rate of smoking, African-American smokers are more likely to develop smoking-related diseases and to die from them than are Caucasians," said Lorraine Reitzel, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Health Disparities Research at MD Anderson Cancer Center.  "Investigating factors that affect smoking cessation within this population is important to increase our understanding of how to reduce smoking-related health disparities among this group."

More than 45,000 African-Americans die in the United States from smoking related cancers per year.

Pre-quit, quit-day and post-quit

Participants were followed over a six-month period during three stages of the study: pre-quit, quit-day and post-quit. During the first stage, data was collected on demographics including educational level and employment status, as well as tobacco dependence, so that known effects of these things on smoking cessation could be controlled for in the data analyses.

A grimmer prognosis awaits African-Americans when compared to Caucasian patients suffering from renal cell carcinoma (RCC), the most common form of invasive kidney cancer.

In a recent study lead at the National Cancer Institute and published in the Cancer journal, researchers found that African-Americans tend to have a poorer 5-year survival rate than Caucasians regardless of clinical data and patient demographics. "There is a consistent disparity between the races," said Wong-Ho Chow, Ph.D., professor in MD Anderson's Department of Epidemiology and lead investigator on the study.

In this study, clinical data and demographics of nearly 40,000 RCC patients diagnosed over a 15-year period from 12 registries in the National Cancer Institute's Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) program, were analyzed.

The study revealed the 5-year relative survival rate for Caucasians diagnosed with invasive kidney cancer was 72.6% as compared to 68% for African-Americans regardless of age, sex, tumor size or stage, type of RCC and surgical procedures performed. SEER data also showed a poorer survival rate among men and older patients as compared to women and younger patients.

By Katrina Burton, MD Anderson Staff Writer

Tobacco use has long been known to cause lung cancer and increased morbidity in smokers. A study sponsored by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) recently revealed the positive impact of U.S.-initiated tobacco control policies and programs with the prevention of 795,000 lung cancer deaths from 1975 through 2000.

Researchers at MD Anderson and Rice University collaborated as one of six lung cancer modeling groups for the NCI-sponsored Cancer Intervention and Surveillance Modeling Network Consortium. They applied a comparative modeling approach in which detailed smoking histories of 30- to 84-year-olds born from 1890 to 1970 were related to lung cancer mortality in mathematical models.

Using these models, researchers analyzed the impact of changes in smoking patterns resulting from tobacco control activities initiated after the U.S. Surgeon General's Report on Smoking and Health was released in 1964.

By Katrina Burton, MD Anderson Staff Writer

At an early age, children are naturally physically active, full of energy and often find joy in running and jumping in an unstructured environment. However, as children transition to adolescence, physical activity levels tend to decline, particularly among girls. This is also a time when excess weight gain often occurs.

Physical inactivity and obesity are important risk factors for a variety of cancers, and behaviors developed during adolescence can persist into adulthood. Identifying factors that contribute to physical activity during this critical stage of development may help future efforts to promote continued activity among adolescents. Mexican-American adolescents exhibit an increased prevalence of obesity compared to other adolescent populations.

So what are the factors that influence physical activity and sedentary behaviors in Mexican-American adolescents? Researchers at MD Anderson Cancer Center's Division of Cancer Prevention and Population Sciences are studying social, cultural and environmental factors that are believed to be important in answering this question.

By Katrina Burton

New data released from the Selenium and Vitamin E Cancer Prevention Trial (SELECT) shows men who took daily doses of vitamin E had significantly more prostate cancers compared to men who took a placebo.

SELECT, a cancer prevention trial funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), closed in September 2008, with initial findings indicating no reduction in the risk of prostate cancer for participants using selenium or vitamin E supplements. Early results also suggested that there was a possible relationship between vitamin E and prostate cancer that might have been due to chance.

Recent findings published in the Oct. 12 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association paint a different picture.

No benefits
Almost three years after the trial recommended that participants stop using the supplements for lack of evidence of benefit, further analysis revealed a 17 percent increase in prostate cancers among men who took vitamin E supplement compared to participants receiving a placebo.

"The findings are important because we now know for sure that there is no benefit for men who take vitamin E supplements," said Elise Cook, M.D, associate professor of Clinical Cancer Prevention and co-investigator on the study at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. "Vitamin E does not prevent prostate cancer, and appears to not only increase the risk of prostate cancer, but in some cases it increases the risk of heart failure and mortality in patients with coronary artery disease."