iCAN-Help

Questionnaires to assess well-being and adherence to a cancer prevention program.

In the UK, many people have poor awareness of cancer risk and its relationships to wider health and lifestyle. Engaging with such people and increasing their health literacy and awareness of risk factors has great potential to empower individuals to increase the quality of life and to reduce future cancer incidence and mortality.

Providing individuals with information about risk factors for future disease is an important public health approach to educate individuals on how to prevent disease. To enhance the motivational value of providing information on epidemiological risk factors together with assessing relevant biology enhances both understanding and motivation to reduce risk factors before disease occurs.

Such has been shown, for example, in coronary vascular disease risk reduction strategies whereby measuring cholesterol and other lipids profiles provides a context for lifestyle interventions.

Molecular based biomarkers including genomics, epigenomics and proteomic all offer relevant biological insights into cancer risk. The question remains, how best could these “omics” measures be integrated and used to motivate individuals to improve their lifestyle with the view that this will lead to disease prevention.

In this project, we are evaluating the use of a cancer risk assessment based on a multi-omics test (M.O.T.). We are employing the assessment in a range of groups to promote health and wellbeing and to inform and motivate risk factor reduction and behavioural change at the individual level. We are working with a range of end-users to further develop and evaluate the test. The test includes a range of biological assessments of the person’s genetic predisposition to cancer (assessed by a polygenic SNP score) together with measurement the amount of methylation of the participant’s DNA which gives insights into environmental and lifestyle exposures together with a measure of their biological age which is an emerging marker of more general health and rate of ageing.

Our research group at the University of Manchester is undertaking this study with a view to improve cancer prevention and wellbeing. The program consists of three stages, cancer risk assessment, biomarker risk assessment and cancer prevention advice. Participants are asked to complete our online cancer risk assessment, provide a blood sample which we will assess their predisposition to 3 particular cancers, breast, prostate and pancreatic cancer. We provide an activity tracker and ask participants to wear it so we can work with participant to identify health related goals.

To assess the adherence and their well-being before, during and after the prevention program, we have created the app which contains various questionnaires. The questionnaires are scheduled to collect data to monitor progress and assess satisfaction. All the collected data is anonymised and safely stored at the University of Manchester.