(Press-News.org) LOS ANGELES (July 13, 2015) - Research for Her™, Cedars-Sinai's groundbreaking online registry that matches women with research studies and clinical trials, enrolled study participants more quickly when compared with traditional paper-based registries, according to new research published in the journal Gynecologic Oncology.
Historically, fewer women have participated in clinical research and only 3 to 5 percent of patients nationally enroll in trials.
"Research for Her is committed to changing these statistics and improving patient lives," said B.J. Rimel, MD, co-principal investigator of Research for Her, part of the Cedars-Sinai Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer Institute, and first author of the study.
A total of 322 women were enrolled in the Cedars-Sinai Research for Her registry over a 14-month period - a 4.3 fold increase over the paper-based registry. Of these 322 women, 263 were matched to at least one study and of those, 39 eligible individuals went on to enroll. The enrollment process increased in speed by 27 percent.
The Research for Her registry also spurred a 50 percent increase in enrollments for the Gilda Radner Hereditary Cancer Program, part of the Women's Cancer Program at the Cedars-Sinai Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer Institute, in 2014. Founded in 1991, the Gilda Radner program consists of several research studies for women at higher risk for breast and ovarian cancer.
Research for Her, created in 2013, is currently open to all women over the age of 18 with or without a prior history of cancer. It soon will expand to also enroll and link men to available clinical trials or research studies at Cedars-Sinai.
"The early successes of Research for Her are encouraging," said Steven Piantadosi, MD, PhD, director of the Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer Institute and the Phase One Foundation Chair. "We are eager to continue fostering the program's growth and potential, while bolstering patient lives."
Next steps also include identifying innovative methods to capture complex data from patients - such as molecular tumor profiling - to further decrease the time to enrollment for studies and provide more comprehensive prescreening for patients.
INFORMATION:
Additional Cedars-Sinai authors involved in the study include Research for Her co-principal investigator Beth Y. Karlan, MD, director of the Women's Cancer Program at the Cedars-Sinai Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer Institute and director of the Division of Gynecologic Oncology in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology; Jenny Lester, MPH, CCRP, senior research project advisor in the Women's Cancer Program at the Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer Institute; Catherine Bresee, MS, senior biostatistician in the Cedars-Sinai Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Core; Diane Park, clinical research coordinator; and Catherine Dang, MD, associate director of the Wasserman Breast Cancer Risk Reduction Program. Leah Sabacan, MBA, now with the University of California, San Francisco, also contributed to this study.
Citation: Gynecologic Oncology: 2015 July: A novel clinical trial recruitment strategy for women's cancer.
Spending more leisure time sitting was associated with a higher risk of total cancer risk in women, and specifically with multiple myeloma, breast, and ovarian cancers, according a new study. The higher risk was present even after taking into account BMI, physical activity, and other factors. The study, appearing in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers, and Prevention, found no association between sitting time and cancer risk in men.
While extensive research links physical activity to cancer prevention, few studies have examined the link between sitting time and the risk of ...
Researchers from North Carolina State University and Brown University have found that nanoscale wires (nanowires) made of common semiconductor materials have a pronounced anelasticity - meaning that the wires, when bent, return slowly to their original shape rather than snapping back quickly.
"All materials have some degree of anelasticity, but it is usually negligible at the macroscopic scale," says Yong Zhu, an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at NC State and corresponding author of a paper describing the work. "Because nanowires are so small, ...
New research from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health suggests that the protein keratin 17 - the presence of which is used in the lab to detect and stage various types of cancers - is not just a biomarker for the disease, but may play a critical role in tumor growth.
This new understanding of how keratin 17 works, the researchers say, could lead to the development of better ways to detect and prevent cancer, and identify new targets for therapeutic treatment. A report on the findings is published July 13 in Nature Genetics.
"Keratin 17 is a sensitive ...
North Carolina State University researchers have developed an effective and environmentally benign method to combat bacteria by engineering nanoscale particles that add the antimicrobial potency of silver to a core of lignin, a ubiquitous substance found in all plant cells. The findings introduce ideas for better, greener and safer nanotechnology and could lead to enhanced efficiency of antimicrobial products used in agriculture and personal care.
In a study being published in Nature Nanotechnology July 13, NC State engineer Orlin Velev and colleagues show that silver-ion ...
A follow-up to a 2005 study of industry relationships among members of Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) at academic health centers finds both improvements in the management of such relationships, with increased levels of disclosure and fewer problematic relationships, and the persistence of problems such as IRB members' voting on protocols with which they may have conflicts of interest, a violation of federal regulations. The new study from the Mongan Institute for Health Policy at Massachusetts General Hospital appears in the July 13 issue of JAMA Internal Medicine. ...
Contact with another player was the most common way boys and girls sustained concussions in a study of U.S. high school soccer players, while heading the ball was the most common soccer-specific activity during which about one-third of boys and one-quarter of girls sustained concussions, according to an article published online by JAMA Pediatrics.
Soccer has increased in popularity in the United States over the past three decades. In 1969-1970, there were 2,217 schools that fielded 49,593 boys' soccer players and no girls' soccer players compared to 2013-2014 when 11,718 ...
While the percentage of institutional review board (IRB) members with an industry relationship has not changed significantly since 2005, the percentage of members who felt other members had not properly disclosed a financial relationship has decreased as did the percentage of IRB members who felt pressure from their institution or department to approve a protocol, according to an article published online by JAMA Internal Medicine.
Academic-industry relationships are defined as academics who provide life science companies (for example biotechnology, drug and device companies) ...
A small imaging study suggests cortical cerebral microbleeds in the brain, which are the remnant of red blood cell leakage from small vessels, were associated with reduced brain blood flow in a group of cognitively normal older patients, according to an article published online by JAMA Neurology.
Cerebral microbleeds (CMBs) are a common finding in magnetic resonance imaging of elderly patients. Some previous research has suggested an association between CMBs and cognitive deficits, although the mechanism is not clear. Some studies also have suggested CMBs may be related ...
Global air travel contributes around 3.5 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions behind/driving anthropogenic climate change, according to the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But what impact does a warming planet have on air travel and how might that, in turn, affect the rate of warming itself?
A new study by researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and University of Wisconsin Madison found a connection between climate and airline flight times, suggesting a feedback loop could exist between the carbon emissions of airplanes and our changing ...
The remarkable ease and accuracy with which scientists can alter genomes using the CRISPR-Cas9 system has led to promising advances toward improving human health and the environment through genetic engineering. Cas9, a protein found naturally in certain bacteria, functions like a pair of molecular scissors to precisely cut sections of DNA and is extremely effective as a gene-editing tool. It can be directed to a specific gene through the use of a matching guide RNA sequence to perform gene mutations, putting programmable control of gene editing in the hands of scientists.
Even ...
