Fun and Fitness for the 40-Something

“Cancer Studies Want You!”

So proclaimed a Newsweek article several months ago. It went on to describe how healthy folks can help prevent cancer and “do more than write a check for cancer research” by participating in a nationwide study. The study will go on for at least 20 years but asks very little from participants.

The article caught my eye because I’d lost a very close friend to liposarcoma less than six months earlier. I was still feeling helpless and frustrated about the seemingly endless onslaught of cancer in this country.

The disease kills more than 1,500 Americans a day–A DAY!!!–and yet, the proposed 2009 budget for the National Cancer Institute calls for only $6 billion in funding. That might sound like a lot, until you hear that we spend $9.5 billion to $25 billion per month on the war in Iraq.

Jonathan Alter wrote recently that “[t]oday, only two in 10 grant proposals from qualified researchers are funded by the NCI, which means that plenty of possible cures die for lack of funding.” With cancer accounting for 25 percent of U.S. deaths, this just boggles my mind. I don’t know about you, but I worry more about dying from cancer than from a terrorist attack.

Doing our part

So I was excited to read about the American Cancer Society’s Cancer Prevention Study-3 (CPS-3). ACS hopes to enroll 500,000 men and women between the ages of 30 and 65 years who have no personal history of cancer. The goal is to better understand the lifestyle, behavioral, environmental and genetic factors that cause or prevent cancer and to ultimately eliminate cancer as a major health problem.

ACS tries to make participation easy:

“Enrollment is a simple, two-phase process. One phase takes place at home and the other takes place at Relay For Life. At the Relay For Life event, you will be asked to: read and sign an informed consent, complete a brief written survey, provide a waist measurement, and give a small blood sample (similar to a doctor’s visit) drawn by a trained, certified phlebotomist. At home you will complete a more detailed survey. This survey will ask for information on your lifestyle, behavioral, and other factors related to your health. We will continue to mail follow-up surveys periodically.”

Here’s the catch–it can be difficult to find a Relay For Life event with enrollment. I marked my calendar for one in the nearby town of Brentwood months in advance. Unfortunately, when the date rolled around, I discovered that the event was being held in a different Brentwood, hundreds of miles away!

I’m very disappointed that I cannot find an enrollment event in my metropolitan area, but I encourage you to check the schedule to see if one is planned near you. Is it just me, or is it strange that enrollment is not easier?

This entry was posted on Monday, August 11th, 2008 at 3:00 am and is filed under Health and Wellness, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.