How Did We Increase Accrual into Pediatric Cancer Studies by 48%?



Many decry the fact that only 3 to 5 percent of adults with cancer in the U.S. join clinical trials, but a deeper challenge emerges when you put faces to these numbers. Close to 90 percent of those who do enroll in trials are white, and only 5.6 percent are Latino. Read here about what the National Cancer Institute (NCI) is doing to increase the enrollment of minority and underserved patients in clinical trials. Also read more about the effort by Redes En Acción, the Latino cancer research network led by the Institute for Health Promotion Research at the UT Health Science Center at San Antonio, the team behind SaludToday, to use patient navigation to boost pediatric cancer clinical trial recruitment in South Texas. Redes, working closely to outreach to and educate the Latino ...

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Increasing the Diversity of the Cancer Research Workforce



Latinos and African Americans make up nearly 25 percent of the U.S. population. Yet, in 2005, they comprised only 3.2 percent of funded principal investigators on National Institutes of Health (NIH) research project grants and 5.5 percent of research trainees supported by NIH training grants. A concerted move is under way to change that, particularly at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), where several programs are focused on increasing the diversity of the cancer research workforce. Read more about this effort ...

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Report: Continued Declines in Overall Cancer Rates



Rates of new diagnoses and rates of death from all cancers combined declined significantly in the most recent time period for men and women overall and for most racial and ethnic populations in the U.S., according to a report from the National Cancer Institute (NCI). The drops are driven by declines in rates of new cases and rates of death for the three leading in men (lung, prostate, and colorectal cancers) and for two of the three leading cancers in women (breast and colorectal cancer). The NCI findings were published online Dec. 7, 2009, in the journal Cancer. Among racial/ethnic groups, cancer death rates were highest in black men and women and lowest in Asian/Pacific Islander men and women. Although trends in death rates by race/ ethnicity were similar for most cancer sites, ...

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