The National Cancer Institute is undertaking a new $34 million study to measure the quality of care that cancer patients receive across the United States and how they fare after their treatment has ended.

The project will involve up to 10,000 cancer patients over a five-year period. Six collaborating medical centers will collect identical information about what happens to the patients following treatment by their personal doctors. Smoking history, weight, diet, physical activity levels, and medications will all be examined along with other patient characteristics and experiences.

For example, at the University of North Carolina, in addition to basic follow-up criteria, researchers will look specifically look at "functional health literacy,"-how people's literacy affects their health.

"Our hypothesis is that people who can't read and can't understand written information given to them by physicians or hospitals might not be able to negotiate the medical system and thus not do as well," said Dr. Robert Sandler, a UNC professor of medicine and epidemiology. UNC investigators will also collect blood samples and tumor tissue from patients to learn if biological factors influence patient recovery, he added.

"We'll learn quite a lot from this study, including whether being poor, living in rural areas or being a minority affects how patients recover," Sandler said. "Of special interest to us will be patients' survival and quality of life. We believe our pooled results eventually could improve both."

Besides the University of North Carolina, other participating institutions will include the Dana Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, both in Boston, the Universities of Iowa and Alabama, and RAND Health in Santa Monica, Calif.

SOURCES:
University of North Carolina School of Public Health (http://www.sph.unc.edu)
National Cancer Institute (http://www.nci.nih.gov)