I hope you have had a joyous holiday weekend. As I sit here on Sunday evening, after a busy weekend with friends and family, I am wishing there had not been so much good food to eat! But, I did get in some productive workouts, lessening my guilt. I am sorry to have skipped my blog last week, but the time flew by and I just didn’t get to sharing my thoughts in time.
Last Sunday was the Chris4Life Walk/Run for Colon Cancer; this foundation has supported the work of John Marshall and colleagues in the Ruesch Center. Along with other members of Team Georgetown, Harriet and I walked in near-Arctic conditions, and I gave a brief talk to the crowd at the end of the race. The Chris4Life Colon Cancer Foundation is led by Michael Sapienza, who has done an amazing job with this organization, which now has a national presence. We walked the 5K in about one hour; the winning runner crossed the finish line in about 15 minutes. Perhaps I need to ratchet up my workouts…
Harriet and I headed up to Philadelphia last week to share the Passover holiday with my father, brother and other family members, returning Tuesday night. On Thursday, we had a conference call with several members of our External Advisory Committee to review our CPC and Minority Health and Health Disparities write ups for the CCSG. We got great feedback, as we did for our other programs, director’s sections, administrative sections and shared resources. We are planning to go to the printer by May 1, so the heat is on! I actually spent a lot of time over this weekend reading and putting to bed all of my sections, along with many of the administrative sections. It was a lot of work, but I must say that I was deeply impressed by what I read.
Last week we also held a reception at the Smithsonian Institution’s Anacostia Community Museum and a viewing of a wonderful documentary about health disparities in the nation’s capital, produced by The Discovery Channel. The Museum is an absolute gem – one might even say it is a diamond, as the walls of room where we held our event are adorned with posters documenting the rich tradition of baseball in Washington. Needless to say, I found it to be fascinating! But, more importantly, the documentary was profound and moving. The health disparities statistics in our city are alarming and certainly are powerful calls to action. I am so proud of what we are doing at Georgetown Lombardi and at a University level to address these disparities, and I remain inspired by what Lucile Adams-Campbell and her colleagues are doing to make a difference in our city.
Below is just one snippet from the Director’s Overview in our upcoming CCSG application that pertains to these efforts.
- Strategically Located Community-Based Sites Move Research Into the LCCC Catchment Area. LCCC’s catchment area of 3.9 million individuals includes the District of Columbia (DC) and its surrounding counties—Montgomery and Prince George’s in Maryland and Arlington/Alexandria City and Fairfax in Virginia. Located in wards of DC with a high proportion of disadvantaged individuals, the Office of Minority Health and Health Disparities Research and the Capital Breast Care Center (CBCC) have enhanced LCCC research capabilities. Adams-Campbell, member of CPC, received an NIMHD P60 grant in 2012 to establish a Center of Excellence for Health Disparities Research (P60MD006920). LCCC invested in a state-of-the-art exercise physiology laboratory at this site to translate discoveries linking obesity to cancer risk into clinical trials testing cancer risk reduction interventions. Other trials open at the site focus on HPV and cervical cancer, nutrition, healthy lifestyles, biospecimen knowledge awareness, and breast cancer. The CBCC, providing free mammography screening to about 1,800 uninsured and low-income women yearly since 2004, now serves as a site for health disparities research. It was the Lombardi site for the collaborative DC Patient Navigation Research Program, a national, multisite, NCI-funded initiative (2005-2010) designed to evaluate cancer patient navigation outcomes (site PIs: Mandelblatt [CPC], Eng-Wong [BC]; Ramsey, Cancer 2009; Bensick, under review). An ongoing trial by O’Neill (BC) and Willey (BC) funded by the Prevent Cancer Foundation is assessing awareness of mammographic breast density as a risk factor for breast cancer (Hoffman, Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2012). Impact: This work better places LCCC in the underserved minority community to study and favorably influence cancer risk-associated health behaviors.
Have a great week.