Psychologist was pioneer in cancer prevention
The death of cancer specialists is not usually noteworthy — unless they die of cancer. So when chronic lymphocytic leukemia claimed Jane Wardle, 64, last month, her passing made waves outside her native Britain.
Among the U.K.’s leading health psychologists, Wardle was a behavioural scientist at the forefront of cancer prevention.
She “made major contributions to screening, early diagnosis and survivorship, maximizing the chances of good long-term outcomes, in the process taking behavioural preven- tion from a somewhat marginal position to the very heart” of cancer research in Britain, noted the Guardian.
A professor of clinical psychology and director of the Health Behaviour Research Centre at University College London, Wardle knew that effective cancer prevention involves both the science of what drives behaviour (diet, alcohol intake, fitness, overall lifestyle) and recognizing how to alter that behaviour to reduce cancer risk.
Wardle brought “credibility and rigour to research areas that were previously viewed as ‘soft’ on account of being outside of traditional clinical research, but are now recognized to have a major impact on cancer prevention in Canada and globally,” said Prof. David Hammond of the University of Waterloo’s school of public health and health systems.
Despite her emphasis on behaviour, one study she headed put the onus on genes. Wardle looked at more than 5,000 pairs of twins and found that a child’s risk of becoming overweight, thus boosting their risk of cancer later in life, is 75 per cent due to nature (genes) and just 25 per cent due to nurture (the environment in which they grow up).
“This study shows that it is wrong to place all the blame for a child’s excessive weight gain” on parenting, Wardle said of the 2008 study.
Another study she co-wrote found that 40 per cent of colorectal cancers can be prevented by a simple, one-off flexible sigmoidoscopy (a screening procedure).
Wardle “leaves significant footprints in the field of psychosocial oncology — a specialty that seeks to document the best ways to support individuals across their lifespan in terms of healthier lifestyles to prevent cancer, responsiveness to potential cancer threats and people’s multi-faceted experience with cancer,” Prof. Carmen Loiselle, director of oncology nursing at McGill University, wrote in an email.
As for awareness of cancer’s warning signs, it seemed to mirror Britain’s class system. A 2009 study that Wardle co-authored found that awareness of symptoms was lower in those who were male, younger and from lower socio-economic groups or ethnic minorities. Wardle was 46 when a routine blood test revealed she had cancer. “I dealt with that first shock by using the time-honoured tactic of assuming that there had been a mistake,” she wrote in 2002, in an article titled “Physician, Heal Thyself.”
Over the next few harrowing weeks, she tried “every variation of denial. There must be a mistake; this must be a nightmare and I will wake up. I pleaded with my husband to tell me it wasn’t true. I shunned the scientific journals that arrived daily on my desk.”
Denial alternated with fear. She regressed to the sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll of her youth. Her family “resignedly” supported this.
In the end, she discovered that psychologists “have been better at describing the emotional reactions (to cancer) than offering recommendations for managing them.”