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One of the primary roles of cancer prevention strategies in adolescents and young adults stated by Dr. Archie Bleyer in an article in CA Journal, has been to prevent cancer in later adulthood by instilling lifestyles and preventive practices during formative years. This preventative tactic is already difficult enough to tackle among young adults, let alone reaching minority groups that might not have the same access to care as other communities. As we look at prevention in young adults, how do we reach these smaller groups?
“Prevention in minority populations has been met with challenges unique not only to each group’s cultural beliefs, but also to language, socioeconomic status, and other factors,” states Cure Magazine.
At UC Berkeley, looking for volunteer opportunities, I stumbled across the Women’s Cancer Resource Center (WCRC), which to me contains many of the components towards a solution. Taking the Latina population and breast cancer, this center offered a completely different outlook, a personal and cultural center that was the answer for many women initially seeking answers to questions about their breasts and cancer.
Entering the Women’s Cancer Resource center you see that the walls are covered in local artist’s paintings and immense woven tapestries fusing vivid colors. There are countless shelves of literature all categorized for easy use and a smaller room hidden off to the side. The sign at the top of the door reads, “Latinas con Cáncer,” and is an area designated especially for Latina women. Resources are bilingual and this helps to break down the Spanish language barriers that exist to really embrace the idea of cultural competency in the realm of health education and prevention. One might ask why such a program is so important specifically to Latinas. It is part of the solution to the paradox plaguing Latina women where breast cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths even though they have lower incidence rates. This increased death rate is due to late diagnosis in part from the lack of cancer education, early prevention techniques employed, language compensations, all intertwined with cultural attitudes and misconceptions within the Latina community.
Even though there is a lower incidence rate for Latinas, they are still more likely to have large tumors and metastatic cancer, causing breast cancer to be the leading source of death among Latina women. The difference is that 70 per 100,000 Hispanic women develop breast cancer a year but only 40% of the women are utilizing mammography.
Within some of the culture breasts are viewed to be maternal, rather sexual, and something private that isn’t shared often with a doctor. There are even some Latina women that believe that if they talk about cancer, it is more likely to happen. With that we see a definite barrier to prevention seeded within a culture that maintains privacy around a woman’s body and experiences.
Ysabel Duron, Director of Latinas Contra Cancer, an organization that has developed creative ways to reach and educate the Latino community about cancer says, “One of our major goals is to try and educate the community that meets their needs and meets them where they live, work, and worship, instead of waiting for them to come to us.”
More educational outlets need to be created as one of the ten essential public health services include the ability to inform, educate, and empower people regarding health issues. It is also an essential service to link people to needed personal health services, to get them to the appropriate cancer centers in the area. The issue with intervention strategies, regardless of the type, is that they must struggle to demonstrate that they are offering something of local and personal value to community members. All of these tactics must be implemented creatively, in order to draw on the qualities of the Hispanic community.
Understanding and applying these cultural factors is the key in designing a program that tries to curb late diagnosis of breast cancer through increasing education of the disease as well as promoting cancer screening. Their peers could even recruit from women within the community so the more respected women would be chosen to bring in a sense of familiarity to the program. There needs to be a network of females reaching out with their own knowledge to other women to create friendships and increase available outlets such as Latinas Contra Cancer which impart health initiatives targeting Latinas at mother-daughter events. Once that personal bond is created, the flow of knowledge back and forth in limitless, and the silence of cancer can be broken not only within the Latina community but countless other communities as well.
Finally, the article interestingly states future prospects, “To the extent that minority populations don’t either avail themselves or get access to some of the early diagnosis and screening programs that currently exist, one might anticipate that the impact [of prevention strategies] would be even larger [than in the white population].”
Sarah Sharaf is an AYA Cancer Advocate. She is a co-author for the SeventyK Adolescent and Young Adult Cancer Patient’s Bill of Rights.
