Population Sciences and Cancer Outcomes

Theme 1: Reduce tobacco use in vulnerable populations and provide evidence to guide tobacco policy. 

Theme 2: Develop and evaluate cancer screening strategies that maximize benefits while minimizing harms.

Theme 3: Develop interventions to improve the health and quality of life of cancer patients, survivors and their caregivers.

Program members lead observational studies of real-world tobacco use patterns and conduct intervention studies of innovative tobacco cessation approaches. Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer mortality in our catchment area and smoking remains elevated, as in many rural areas. Our members contribute to cancer prevention strategies by generating evidence used by regulatory bodies, public health organizations, and healthcare providers to reduce tobacco use. 

Program members identify effective approaches for delivering high quality cancer screening, with a particular focus on the evaluation of new technologies in clinical practice and risk-based screening strategies that seek to maximize the benefits of early detection while minimizing harms such as false positive tests. Our members have notable impact in informing national breast cancer screening recommendations, and our multi-center breast imaging registry ensures that our work has particular relevance to our catchment area.

Program members identify key behaviors associated with health promotion, symptom management, and well-being at all stages of the cancer care continuum and implement interventions at the individual, dyadic, institutional, community, or policy level. Particular attention is paid to adapting these interventions—including exercise and caregiver support--to those living in rural areas and innovating virtual delivery approaches to improve and extend care.

A cross-cutting area of focus is rural cancer control, as 75% of residents in our catchment area live in rural areas. Our members focus on addressing key challenges in rural populations, seeking to better characterize the socio-demographic factors that place rural residents at higher risk, the availability and quality of cancer care, and developing novel healthcare delivery approaches, including remote interventions.