Abstract D021: Chinese E-Women Project: A community-based approach to improving breast cancer knowledge among Chinese American women

Abstract

Abstract Background: Breast cancer is the most common cancer for Chinese women living in the United States (U.S.). Despite overall rates being significantly lower than other races and ethnicities, incidence has steadily increased over the last few decades. This is concerning given that Asian Americans are the fastest growing racial group in the U.S. and Chinese Americans constitute the largest Asian American ethnic population. In addition, mammography screening rates are low among Chinese American women, and this may be attributable to a lack of breast cancer knowledge and awareness. Methods: The Chinese E-Women Project (CEWP) is a breast health education and engagement program developed by the Orange County Herald Center (OCHC), a non-profit organization that serves the Chinese American community in Orange County, California. Two key CEWP components are the Community Gatekeeper Education Session (CGES), which is a formal education session led by trained OCHC staff to engage and educate Chinese American community leaders, and the E-Women Tea Time (EWTT), which is an informal peer group education session led by a past CGES participant. All CGES and EWTT events presented information on breast cancer epidemiology, biology, and screening. Questionnaires testing breast cancer knowledge were administered before and after the education session at each event. We pooled data across the CGES and EWTT events separately and used Wilcoxon signed rank test to evaluate change in participants’ overall knowledge. We also examined change in knowledge by question using McNemar’s test. Results: Our analysis included a total of 94 CGES and 149 EWTT female participants. For both CGES and EWTT, we observed significant improvements in overall breast cancer knowledge after the education session (both p<0.0001). Although we did identify one question related to mammography and another question related to personal breast health that did not show significant improvement after the session, knowledge for all other questions significantly improved (all p<0.05). Conclusions: These findings highlight community-based education sessions as effective ways of both informing Chinese American women about breast cancer and engaging them to become advocates of breast health wellness in their community. Future research should evaluate whether these types of sessions can lead to positive individual changes in behavior and screening practice. Citation Format: Alice W Lee, Cindy Puga, Michelle Tsai, Sherry Huang. Chinese E-Women Project: A community-based approach to improving breast cancer knowledge among Chinese American women [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the Twelfth AACR Conference on the Science of Cancer Health Disparities in Racial/Ethnic Minorities and the Medically Underserved; 2019 Sep 20-23; San Francisco, CA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2020;29(6 Suppl_2):Abstract nr D021.