Researcher seeks Black cancer survivors
A Dalhousie University researcher is looking for Black cancer survivors in Nova Scotia to take part in a voluntary study.
Joy Chiekwe is a master's student working with Nova Scotia Health in an exercise lab at the Queen Elizabeth II Health Sciences Centre's Victoria General hospital for cancer patients and survivors.
“Over the last three years, we've been running exercise programs outside of the Victoria General as well as online since COVID hit and through those, over the last few years, we've probably (had) over
300 participants, and of those participants, only about one or two have been – or identified as – Black,” Chiekwe said in a recent telephone interview.
“My goal is to kind of increase that and then also because in Canada, the Canadian
Cancer Society does not differentiate between race or ethnicity when they put their cancer incidencies into the big network, so without that valuable data, we're not too sure what populations are being diagnosed at what rate, and that's what we're targeting – the proper populations at the right rate.” Chiekwe said researchers might be missing out on a vast number of people who are being either forgotten about or just not being represented in the data.
Her team is not sure why this might be the case as it seems to only be Canada that is not providing the breakdown by ethnicity, Chiekwe said.
“The (United) States does it. Overseas, they record it, individual programs will report it but it's not reported on a large scale, so there could be data missing and unless you have access to every single study or doctor's notes, it's kind of hard to tell how many people are being diagnosed so it is more of an oversight by just Canada's government, I'm told.”
With better data and a clearer picture of how the African Nova Scotian community is affected by cancer, the researcher is hoping to look at how to improve overall quality of life after a cancer diagnosis.
“Based on the research in the States and overseas, Black people are dying at higher rates compared to their white counterparts, so if we are missing these people in the data, we're missing opportunities to limit the disparity there,” Chiekwe said.
The online survey is live at https://researchstudy.nshealth.ca/surveys/ ?s=ML4NPEPE4REKEER7.
“My online survey will be open until the first week of February and then from there, I'll be doing interviews and stuff to kind of get more of in-depth responses to questions and kind of understand the whole story versus just the yes-or-no questions online,” Chiekwe said.
After the survey closes, her lab will be open “forever,” she said. So getting as many people in as possible would be awesome.
There is not a target number for survey participants.
“But obviously, the more responses, the better,” Chiekwe said. “It's an anonymous survey, so, a lot of people kind of do have some mistrust with the health-care system but if they know that their information is completely anonymous and no one would ever be identified after filling out the survey, that's probably the most important thing – that they have trust in the researchers.”