Launching projects
The summaries of the center's current research projects appearing on the CCBR Web site (www.dana-farber.org/ccbr) belie the effort that goes into each one.
Practicing what they preach, members of the CCBR staff recently organized a physical activity challenge to encourage each other to exercise regularly.
Consider Healthy Directions — Small Businesses, funded by the National Cancer Institute for four years and scheduled to wrap up in February 2003. The undertaking, says Project Director Lorraine Wallace, MPH, has involved recruiting companies, developing the "intervention" and carrying it out, and surveying employees both before and after the program to see whether any changes have occurred. The initial survey involved more than 2,000 workers and managers in participating companies — a task that took six months. (Its companion study, Healthy Directions — Health Centers, entailed querying some 2,000 patients.) Like many of the CCBR's projects, Healthy Directions has a strong occupational-health component and has included visits by the center's industrial hygienists, Richard Youngstrom and Wesley Straub, to advise on hazards in the workplace.
"The work we do is heavily based on the epidemiology of cancer risk," notes Sorensen, principal investigator for Healthy Directions and several other center projects. "From epidemiology, we learn cutting-edge information about the risk factors we should be focusing on, the prevalence of risk in different populations, and the social causes of risk."
Along the way, projects often get tweaked for effectiveness. At Tympanium, CCBR staff found that although the healthy-diet messages were appropriate for Caucasian employees, they did not resonate with many of the Vietnamese workers — who already eat plenty of fruits and vegetables. These employees needed reinforcement rather than education.
"That's a key challenge that cuts across all our projects, whether it's working with unions, churches, health centers, or work sites," says Barbeau. "We have to figure out ways to ask questions that are relevant not only to the scientific community, but to the community in which we're doing our research."
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