Cancer is the leading cause of death among Latinos, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Yet Latinos and other minority groups are underrepresented in cancer research. Some local researchers are working to change that.
Magdalena Hernandez is a single mother of three children. She came to the United States more than 20 years ago. She likes being around her friends and family for the holidays, like most people. She also has an advanced form of cancer in her bone marrow. It’s not curable.
She said there are days where she’s in so much pain it hurts to use her hands and brush her teeth or she’s fainted in the shower.
“Right now, as we’re speaking, I do have pain. But it’s not very drastic. I can deal with it.”
Hernandez was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in January 2017. She said the X-rays of her bones resembled swiss cheese. She held up her fingers in a circle the size of a golf ball to show the size of a hole in her hip bone.
“He would tell me I would have to have support and assistance on my hip and I would have chemotherapy very aggressively.”
In addition to chemotherapy, Hernandez also had a stem cell transplant. Both are standard for her type of cancer. The treatments have helped and her cancer is dormant right now, but she says in a few years she will need another transplant.
Sharon Stack is the director of the Harper Cancer Research Institute at the University of Notre Dame.
“Cancer is very complicated. A lot of people ask me ‘hey Sharon, when are you going to cure cancer’ and I have to tell them that cancer isn’t just one disease."
She said without basic cancer research, there would be no treatments like the ones that are helping Hernandez.
“The research portion is so important because essentially its’ research that cures cancer. Without research we don’t have any diagnostics, any treatments, any cures.”
But Stack said not enough research includes minorities.
“The patients that are seen at Beacon or at MHO or St. Joe or South Bend clinic are not really represented in research. 80 percent of patients in the United States get their care in the community hospital settings, but the research is done on those 20 percent of patients at the big academic medical centers.”
So Stack and a team from Notre Dame, who did some work in Pueblo, Mexico, decided to collaborate with Colleen Morrison from Beacon Children’s Hospital to try and improve those numbers.
“What they described to me that they were seeing in Mexico is that some of the children were not doing as well as what we experience here in the United States.”
The research is still in the early stages. Right now, Morrison is collecting samples from all patients with Leukemia. She said it’s important to include a diverse group of people in cancer research because not everyone responds to treatments the same.
“We’ve also learned that children who are of Latin American decent seem to have a higher risk of developing Leukemia and they also tend not to respond to the traditional therapy so they have an increased risk for recurrence.”
Morrison said cancer can affect anyone, and the research should reflect that.
Most people have experienced the disease, or know someone who has. For Stack, it’s the memory of her father.
“I lost my dad to cancer when I was a student, so it’s very personal to me as well, and it makes me cry to think about it but it’s something that really impacts people.”
For Hernandez, it’s her children, especially her 9-year-old son. “Every morning he wakes up, he runs to me, gives me a hug and a kiss and says, ‘Mom, you’re going to be okay right? I’ll come back home from school and find you right?’”
There are different ideas around the research community on how to be more inclusive but they agree on one thing - cancer does not discriminate. Not against economic status, gender, or ethnicity.
Contact Annacaroline at acaruso@wvpe.org or follow her on Twitter at @AnnacarolineC16
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