Cancer Researchers Begin Large Long-Term Study of Black Women

The American Cancer Society hopes to enroll 100,000 women and follow them for three decades to discover what’s causing higher case and death rates.

The American Cancer Society has begun an ambitious, far-reaching study focusing on a population that has long been overlooked, despite high rates of cancer and cancer-related deaths: Black women.

The initiative, called VOICES of Black Women, is believed to be the first long-term population study of its size to zero in specifically on the factors driving cancer prevalence and deaths among Black women.

Researchers plan to enroll 100,000 Black women without cancer, ages 25 to 55, in Washington, D.C., and 20 states where most Black American women reside. The subjects will be surveyed twice a year about their behaviors, environmental exposures and life experiences, and followed for 30 years; any cancers they may develop will be tracked.

Similar studies by the American Cancer Society in the past yielded critical lessons about what causes cancer — for example, identifying cigarette smoking as a cause of lung cancer and linking red- and processed-meat consumption to increased risk of colon cancer.

While some earlier studies have included large numbers of Black women, the research wasn’t able to “hone in on the specific drivers of cancer in that population,” said Dr. Alpa Patel, senior vice president of population science at the society and co-principal investigator of the VOICES study, along with Dr. Lauren McCullough.

“In general population studies, you tend to ask questions that are going to be applicable to the majority of the population,” she said. “So going deeply into the lived experiences of discrimination, bias, systematic issues, environmental influences and cultural aspects of health-related behaviors, and how the narratives around them are shaped in different populations — those types of unique aspects of understanding what contributes to cancer in a population weren’t being asked about.”