A strategy for promoting cancer screening among low-income women through telephone calls offering encouragement and logistical support has been effective in New York City, and some Medicaid Managed Care Centers are planning to test the approach this summer.

The strategy uses trained counselors to contact by telephone women who are overdue to be screened for breast, cervical, or colon cancer. Women in underserved communities have low screening rates, and screening is one way to prevent deaths from these cancers.

In a randomized clinical trial to test the intervention, researchers found that women who received the telephone support - four phone calls on average - had higher screening rates than women who received the standard care of a phone call and a pamphlet.  Read more  

That cancer is an immensely complex disease is not a new observation. It has the remarkable capacity to persist silently until it has advanced to a state of imminent lethality; to withstand powerful cytotoxic therapies; and to co-opt other tissue cytokines from the tumor microenvironment in order to proliferate, invade, and metastasize.

It's no wonder, then, that researchers using novel high-throughput technologies to delve further and further into the molecular machinery of tumors and their micro- and macro-environments are confronting serious issues with regard to managing and mining their research data. At this level of complexity, when researchers are, for instance, attempting to tease out from their data patterns of molecular behavior among many competing and cooperating genes, proteins, and cell signaling pathways, they are increasingly in need of new, advanced mathematical tools and a team approach.  Read more  

The NCI Cancer Bulletin is produced by the National Cancer Institute (NCI). NCI, which was established in 1937, leads the national effort to eliminate the suffering and death due to cancer. Through basic, clinical, and population-based biomedical research and training, NCI conducts and supports research that will lead to a future in which we can identify the environmental and genetic causes of cancer, prevent cancer before it starts, identify cancers that do develop at the earliest stage, eliminate cancers through innovative treatment interventions, and biologically control those cancers that we cannot eliminate so they become manageable, chronic diseases. For more information on cancer, call 1-800-4-CANCER or visit http://www.cancer.gov. NCI Cancer Bulletin staff can be reached at ncicancerbulletin@mail.nih.gov.