On July 9, 2014, UK announced a $3.75 million grant from the CDC for colorectal cancer prevention in Eastern Kentucky.
Sherry Payne: I am a colon cancer survivor. Unfortunately, I was too young for screening.
I was only 44 when I was diagnosed and I was told I may live two years.
The reason colon cancer is such a killer is by the time you have symptoms, it too late usually.
Richard Crosby: Colorectal cancer is the second leading killer in the United States among men and women.
What this funding does, not just for rural Kentucky but for all of rural Appalachia,
is potentially creates a model that will save thousands of lives.
Our job is to help people see they can use a very simple kit, called a FIT kit,
to simply test their stool for antibodies to polyps that may exist in their colon.
Antibodies are just your own immune system recognizing a foreign invader, and saying, “this thing doesn’t belong in the body, let’s attack it.”
So antibodies are developed in response to a polyp.
A polyp is nothing more than an abnormal growth in your colon. It precedes cancer, often by several years.
There’s a “forgiveness factor” with this cancer: it doesn’t grow quickly.
So if you can find evidence that there might be something wrong, there’s plenty of time to have that polyp surgically removed.
If there is nothing wrong, you can skip the colonoscopy.
The test itself is very simple, you’re going to do this two days in a row,
a simple brush is all it takes to put a specimen on a card that you mail in.
The project provides free FIT kits to local health departments
and supports outreach over the next 5 years.
Tom Collins: Dr. Crosby actually recruited me to come onto the Rural Cancer Prevention Center because I am a native to Eastern Kentucky.
When we have professors from University or someone from outside the area who does not have our accent,
they can be labeled as an outsider, someone who is not trusted by the community.
So I think that’s very important that we have people on this project such as myself and the nurses and nurse practitioner
that we work with all are local individuals who all have connections to the communities that we provide the services for.
We will have an outreach team which is gonna be composed of two nurses and some lay health advisors,
who will go out and speak to the masses in Eastern Kentucky about the need for this screening test,
and at those events we will actually be distributing those test kits to individuals
and providing them with free readings of the test kits
If you do have indications that you need a colonoscopy then we will try to navigate you through the healthcare system so that you can get that colonoscopy.
And if you don’t have a means of paying for it or you don’t have health insurance,
we’ve worked with our local health departments to help them obtain grant money
to pay for those colonoscopies for people that don’t have health insurance.
Richard Crosby: The new recommendation is to have a FIT test every year with a colonoscopy only at age 65.
What we’re good at in our prevention research here at UK
is understanding what factors promote health behavior change.
So our project funded by CDC
will use behavioral science to promote people’s annual use of the FIT test.
Sherry Payne: Which colon cancer screening is the best one to take, and it’s whichever one somebody will do.
And that’s why this FIT testing is so important and why it will reach so many people in Eastern Kentucky.
Tom Collins: You can’t really touch a family in Eastern Kentucky that hasn’t dealt with cancer deaths in one form or another.
People I grew up with that I knew on a very personal basis,
that, people that had some degree of molding my life that passed away from colon cancer.
So I feel that anything that I can do to prevent one case of colon cancer
in Eastern Kentucky is homage to those individuals.