Newswise — Researchers at The University of Texas School of Public Health El Paso Regional Campus and the UT School of Public Health in Houston are expanding the AMIGAS project, an interventional effort created in 2004 to lower the risks of cervical cancer among Mexican women in U.S. border populations. The expansion is supported by a $1 million, 2-year, grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
According to the National Cancer Institute, although cervical cancer incidence and mortality rates have declined by 50 percent in the United States over the past three decades, the disease remains a serious health threat for Hispanic women.
Theresa Byrd, DrPH, RN, associate professor at the UT School of Public Health El Paso Regional Campus and lead investigator, began the AMIGAS project a little over 3 years ago.
"Rates of cervical cancer are higher among women of Mexican heritage than among non-Hispanic white women," says Byrd, who has spent more than 20 years working with border and migrant populations in Arizona, California, Texas and Chihuahua.
Recently revised and expanded by the CDC, the project is a collaboration among a community health advisory group, promotoras (lay health educators recruited from the local community) and researchers from the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.
Designed to create awareness of cervical cancer among immigrant Mexican women in the United States, the AMIGAS program includes a video, information on a flip chart, a training guide for the promotoras and a listing of local screening services.
The participating women will be from El Paso, Houston and Yakima Valley, Washington. The selected cities encompass three types of regions, a Mexican-U.S. border community, an urban community and a rural community.
If AMIGAS is shown to be effective in increasing rates of cervical cancer screening, the researchers will work toward full adoption, implementation and maintenance of the interventional program.
Byrd published a study in the Journal of Preventive Medicine in 2004, which examined the beliefs and attitudes of Hispanic women from 18-25 years of age toward cervical cancer screening. It found these attitudes and beliefs were associated with cervical cancer screening rates in the El Paso border region. The study recognized that the introduction of the Pap test significantly decreased the rate of cervical cancer among American women overall, but Mexican-American women were less likely to get screened for this type of cancer because of perceived barriers to screening.
To increase screening rates in this population, Byrd and her colleagues at the Center for Health Promotion and Prevention Research at the UT Health Science Center at Houston developed AMIGAS in 2004 to promote cervical cancer screening.
"The development of the project was based on identifying which factors influenced Pap test screening among Latinas, as well as the best methods, strategies and messages to use," says Maria E. Fernandez, Ph.D., co-principal investigator of AMIGAS.
Fernandez adds that the group is optimistic that the program will increase screening. She is an assistant professor and director of diversity programs at the UT School of Public Health and the principal investigator of the Latinos in a Network for Cancer Control (LINCC), a CDC and NCI funded Cancer Prevention and Control Research Network.
Cervical cancer is preventable and curable if detected early. The researchers hope to later continue the interventional program with other Hispanic immigrant populations, in the United States facing the same increases in cervical cancer.
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