If you are in Southern California this weekend, I highly recommend stopping by USC to check out the following conference on cancer in the South Asian community.

According to the California Cancer Registry, the top cancers affecting South Asians in Los Angeles include breast, colorectal, corpus uterine, ovarian, thyroid, prostate, lung, leukemias and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

Recent research conducted by Saath …has uncovered very low screening rates among South Asians for top cancers affecting them. As a result, Saath, with its goal to collaborate with communities to improve the health of South Asians, has developed programs to increase awareness and screening in the community and support those who are affected by cancer. [pakistanlink]

Health disparities for the broader Asian and Pacific Islander (API) communities are relatively stark and it’s not surprising to hear that in the sub-ethnic group of the South Asian American community that the disparities are just as striking. These disparities often revolve around issues of access to screening or lack of education which is also related to a need for in-language resources and culturally competent providers. Saath, a Los Angeles based non-profit organization, focuses their work on researching and outreaching to assist South Asians afflicted with cancer.

What exactly are the cancer disparities? Well this is the tricky part – there hasn’t been much research done on cancer in the South Asian American community. In my opinion, a large reason why there hasn’t been targeted research is because the standard traditional research methods is not able to a) capture the sub-South Asian categories properly or b) capture a statistically significant sample population i.e. the “n”. This is the perpetual catch-22 cycle when it comes to researching our community – how to develop research using both culturally relevant and statistically significant methods that doesn’t compromise the integrity of the research. The folks at Saath have recently released a paper titled, “Rates and Sociodemographic Correlates of Cancer Screening Among Asians” addressing just these issues.

The purpose of this study was to assess rates and correlates of cancer screening in a community sample of South Asians. This study was a collaboration between the UCLA School of Public Health and South Asian Network (SAN), a social service organization in Southern California…

Few participants received screening within guidelines for colorectal (25%), breast (34%), cervical (57%) and prostate cancer (10%). Health insurance, younger age and increased length of stay in the U.S. predicted a higher likelihood of cancer screening. Women were significantly less likely to have received colorectal cancer screening compared to men.[springerlink]

Subscription is needed to view the full report (or e-mail me to request the pdf) and if you are remotely interested in research methods for the South Asian community, I highly recommend this read.

There are a few things I found interesting in this report:

1. Methodology – they recruited participants via telephoning existing contact lists, going to venues and places with high population, and going door-to-door. They particularly focused on oversampling Bangladeshis and Pakistanis and they used South Asian community members to do the recruitment of volunteers.

2. Need – More research needs to be done for the South Asian American community and the data that does exist doesn’t break the ethnic groups down the way it needs to be.

3. Ethnicity – The study shows that Pakistanis were significantly more likely too receive cervical cancer screening but less likely to have received breast cancer screening as compared to Indians in the sample.

4. Foreign-born – The study’s sample was 96% foreign-born. Not necessarily bad, but this reflects that the study is more focused on the 1st generation population. What it does do is highlight the need for research for the native-born 2nd generation South Asian population.

5. Acculturation – The South Asian community risk of cancer increases with acculturation to Western lifestyle.

6. Burden – South Asian are disproportionately burdened by cardiovascular disease and diabetes and that cancer is a growing concern.

Be sure to check out Saath’s resource page where they link to bilingual health resources. The resources on the site, this report and the organizations involved reflect the particular needs of Southern California and I’m sure the conference on Saturday will have a Los Angeles focus. I’d be interested though to hear what kind of work is being done to address health disparities in the rest of the country for the South Asian American community. What organizations are there? What research has been developed? What is being done to address the preventable health disparities for the South Asian American community?