Joel Milam, Ph.D., professor of epidemiology and biostatistics, at the UCI Program in Public Health, was recently awarded an R01 project grant from the National Cancer Institute. The project, titled: “Individual, cultural, and area-based factors associated with survivorship care among Asian American childhood cancer survivors,” is a collaborative project with Kimberly Miller, MPH, PhD, with the Keck School of Medicine of USC.
This new project aims to understand the utilization of cancer-focused survivorship care among Asian American (AA) childhood cancer survivors (CSS). To execute their project, they will conduct qualitative interviews and surveys on the utilization of cancer-focused survivorship care among AA CCS and their parents. They hope to recruit a population-based cohort of young adult AA CCS and their parents in Los Angeles and Orange Counties to examine factors related to survivorship care utilization.
They will also investigate the effect of residing in an ethnically concentrated neighborhood on the utilization of long-term follow-up care. The researchers plan for their findings to provide guidance to identify and address needs among AA CCS for survivorship care utilization. Additionally, they aim to increase culturally congruent outreach and intervention strategies to engage and retain these CCS in care.
This new project extends the research that Milam and Miller, and their third collaborator David Freyer, DO, MS, from Keck, have been conducting at the Center for Young Adult Cancer Survivorship Research. In a recent publication, they reported that, despite high risk for late effects, many CCS do not receive cancer-related follow-up care or written treatment summary. The majority of their study subjects are Hispanic survivors, and they want to better understand the health disparities that affect CCS from racial and ethnic minority backgrounds.
Dr. Milam is a behavioral scientist whose research focuses on pediatric and young adult cancer survivors. He joined the UCI Public Health at the end of 2020. He also has a joint faculty appointment at the UCI School of Medicine in their Division of Hematology/Oncology and is the Co-Leader of the Cancer Control Program at the UCI Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center.
