“It’s only ten percent that were classified differently, but it matters a lot if you’re one of those patients,” said senior author Josh Stuart, a professor of biomolecular engineering at UC Santa Cruz. Stuart helped organize the study as part of the Pan-Cancer Initiative of the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) project…
In a study published this week in Preventive Medicine, researchers from San Diego State University, the Santa Fe Institute, the University of North Carolina and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found that when celebrities publicly discuss their struggles with cancer diagnoses, the resulting media coverage prompts more smokers to search for information on quitting than events like New Year’s Day or World No Tobacco Day. Public health experts have long known these discussions spur others to get screened for cancer or consider the same treatments, but it was unclear whether these discussions also promoted cancer prevention behaviors, like quitting smoking. This question has evaded study because the method most commonly used to assess cancer-related behaviors — annual telephone surveys — isn’t fine-grained enough to tell researchers which events are influencing respondents’ answers. …