Low Incidence of Breast Cancer Cases Found in Hispanic Culture
Hispanic women have a number of risk factors for breast cancer, but they have a relatively low incidence of the disease. Finding out why is one of the aims of the South Texas Women's Health Project at the Hispanic Health Research Center.

The study is a joint project of the UT School of Public Health at Houston, its regional campus in Brownsville, and the University of Texas in Brownsville (UTB).

No breast cancer research has been conducted in Cameron County,
where Brownsville is located, and this will be the first clinical research project in UTB's 12-year history. The overall goal is for established researchers at the UT School of Public Health to train UTB faculty to become independent breast cancer researchers. The training will focus

on the interrelationships between hormones, diet, body size and breast cancer among Hispanic women.

"We will be contacting women, interviewing them, drawing blood and weighing and measuring them," says co-principal investigator Maureen Sanderson, Ph.D., associate professor of epidemiology at The University of Texas School of Public Health's Brownsville Regional Campus, who was in the Peace Corps in Honduras and speaks fluent Spanish.

The Department of Defense (DOD) is funding the four-year study. Findings will be disseminated to the DOD, the Texas Department of Health, and local health providers and health clinics. hare Palmer's vision for the school - that it will become one of the leading schools of public health in the country.

Date Rape Discovery
What is it about Hispanic culture that reduces the rate of dating violence?

That's one of the questions a new study at the Hispanic Health Research Center in the Lower Rio Grande Valley in Brownsville, which has a predominantly Mexican-American population, hopes to answer.

Ann Coker, Ph.D., associate professor in the Division of Epidemiology at the UT School of Public Health working with colleagues at the school's regional campus in Brownsville, is the principal investigator and has done several studies on domestic violence. She and her colleagues are conducting this new cross-sectional study using a random sample of 300 women students
18 years old and older at UT Brownsville.

What motivated the study is Coker's discovery, in earlier research, that greater acculturation is associated with greater rates of partner violence in offspring. "If both parents are from Mexico and now living in the U.S., their children's reported rates of dating violence are lower than if the parents were born here," explains Coker. "The importance is to try to figure out what it is about Hispanic culture that reduces rates of dating violence."

The goals of the study are "to estimate the incidence of dating violence victimization among women college students in the past 12 months and determine how this form of violence may impact health and college success," says Coker.