Funds Needed:
$65,000
Personal Statement from Dr. McVey:
My research focuses on quality of life for women with breast cancer worldwide. In particular, I am trying to help better understand important side effects of treatments for this cancer and the impact of culture on women's lives after diagnosis with this disease. Studying foreign populations of women allows for efficient detailed research that often could not take place in the United States. I hope that the results of my studies will be useful to women everywhere.
Research Projects:
Cohort Studies of Cognitive Functioning Effects of Adjuvant Hormonal Treatment and Intense Chemotherapy for Women with Breast Cancer:
This project will explore the effects of both adjuvant hormonal therapy and intense chemotherapy on cognitive functioning in breast cancer patients over time. To learn more about this study, click here.
Exploratory Focus Groups with Breast Cancer Patients in the Philippines and Vietnam:
Very little is known about the impact of using oophorectomy plus tamoxifen (a global standard of care for breast cancer treatment) on women’s quality of life. Additionally, there is scant knowledge about the overall effects that breast cancer has on women’s quality of life in the Philippines and Vietnam.
In this exploratory research, women are interviewed individually and in groups about how their lives had changed since their breast cancer diagnosis.
Preliminary results of this research suggest that the impact of the disease, its treatment, and the way women cope are similar across cultures, but the way these things are expressed are culturally dependent.
Emotional Changes Experienced by Women with Breast Cancer:
This study focuses on the emotional changes Philippino women diagnosed with breast cancer experience over time.
The Affect Balance Scale, an instrument that measures positive and negative emotions, is being completed by participants in an Adjuvant Oophorectomy Tamoxifen study before surgery and at every follow-up visit. Data also is collected on a control group – women without breast cancer.
Vasomotor Symptoms after Adjuvant Hormonal Treatment for Breast Cancer:
Data from the IBCRF Oophorectomy plus Tamoxifen clinical trial will be analyzed to determine if there is a correlation between women’s reported hot flashes and the length of survival. Since presence of symptoms from therapy may indicate that patients are actively metabolizing the tamoxifen to the forms that both cause symptoms and affect the cancers, one might expect such a correlation.
New Study Exploring the Timing and Frequency of Hot Flashes in Women who Undergo Oophorectomy:
In this study, women will be asked to wear a small device that measures changes in skin temperature and conductivity for a week before surgery, during the procedure and for approximately a month after surgery.
Data will be analyzed in conjunction with biological measures that are already being obtained to determine if hot flashes can be used as an indicator of underlying biological processes that are occurring during and shortly after surgical oophorectomy.
Concurrent with wearing the device, women will record in a journal the number and intensity of any hot flashes they experience. The journals will enable us to determine if women’s self-report of hot flashes correlates with the objective measure, and is thus a valid measure of hot flashes. |
