Project Summary
Asian Pacific Americans (APA) face health disparities with regard to stomach cancer: Korean Americans are eight times and Vietnamese Americans are three times more likely to get stomach cancer than are their Caucasian American counterparts. Unfortunately, due to low detection of stomach cancer in its early stages, only 28 percent of those who get stomach cancer in the United States will survive after 5 years (compared with the 67-percent survival rate in South Korea and Japan). In 2014, with Tier I funding, we launched the first stomach cancer conference in Washington State’s history. From leading health and human service agencies, government agencies, elected officials, and community leaders we learned how concerned they were about stomach cancer, what they saw as barriers to high-risk patients getting early detection, and what actions they were willing to take to make stomach cancer a health priority among the APA community and policy makers. And we learned from secondary research that Pacific Islanders are also at high risk. In Tier II, our advisory council members will develop the comparative effectiveness research question by validating our desired outcome (i.e., improving early detection), selecting the setting (community or clinical), and identifying the patient intervention(s) we would like to test. Early detection of stomach cancer in the United States faces additional challenges because a) screening is not covered for asymptomatic patients, even if they are in high-risk demographic groups; and b) there are few interventions to leverage (stomach cancer research is more common in Asia, Europe, and Latin America because stomach cancer ranks second among cancer-related deaths worldwide).