Fall 2015 Brown Bag Speaker Series: Loraine Escobedo

Disease Surveillance, Control and Prevention: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Maximize Efficacy
Dr. Loraine Escobedo
Spatial Sciences Institute
Post-doctoral Research Associate

In the absence of effective and truly population-based screening, understanding the co-location of late stage cancer and populations with limited access to screening could substantially improve the yield of screening efforts.  Our goals were to identify populations that would most likely benefit from targeted screening and measure the value of improved targeting by estimating the sensitivity and specificity of the approach.  We applied these methods to melanoma incidence data from the Cancer Surveillance Program, the population-based cancer registry for Los Angeles County. This interdisciplinary approach makes use of readily-available data to enhance the efficiency of population-based screening approaches for melanoma, and can be used not only to estimate the potential efficacy of screening programs that have limited resources but also to identify the sensitivity and specificity of any approach that screens only a subset of the total population. In addition, the proposed methods can be applied to improve current early detection programs for other screenable diseases. There are also opportunities for future research to analyze the costs and benefits of targeted early detection versus the status quo, and improve the health of racial/ethnic minority and socioeconomically disadvantaged populations who bear a disproportionate share of poor health outcomes.