Titles and Affiliations
Vice President and Director
Division of Public Health Sciences
Research Area
Providing a large, resource rich database to support research on long-term survivorship in postmenopausal women with breast cancer.
Impact
Life and Longevity After Cancer (LILAC) is a large, national resource developed as a sub cohort of the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) to support research on long-term survivorship, aging, quality of life, and other health outcomes of interest to postmenopausal women with cancer. LILAC enrolled 7,814 breast cancer survivors, and collected cancer treatment, recurrence, and long-term quality-of-life data, and obtained tissue samples from 1,220 breast cancer cases. With access to quality data collected over a long time period, multidisciplinary researchers can study the impact of both pre- and post-diagnosis factors on survival, other chronic diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, osteoporosis, as well as aging, and quality of life in older survivors Dr. Garnet Anderson leads the LILAC study and will utilize BCRF support to complete and maintain the database and tissue biorepository essential for ongoing and future research. LILAC breast cancer survivors represent a key demographic of critical concern—older women with breast cancer—who, despite an increasing burden of the disease, remain underrepresented in cancer survivorship research. Continued funding of LILAC will ensure that the full value of this unique cohort can continue to address the existing knowledge gaps that compromise care and outcomes.
What’s Next
More than 50 scientific articles have been published using LILAC data, and the resource currently supports nine funded research studies with seven more proposals under review. Because LILAC participants are part of the broader WHI, the cohort offers a rare opportunity to pair decades of data on nutrition, physical activity, social drivers of health, and environment with blood and tissue repositories, enabling researchers to study how factors before and after a cancer diagnosis affect survival, chronic disease, aging, and quality of life in older survivors.
Biography
Garnet L. Anderson, PhD is a biostatistician and clinical trialist whose research focuses on chronic disease prevention and women’s health. She is best known for her leadership role in the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI), a National Institutes of Health funded effort to test methods to reduce the risk of cancer, cardiovascular disease and fractures related to osteoporosis in postmenopausal women. In this capacity she served as the lead statistician for the two trials of menopausal hormone therapy. As principal investigator of the Fred Hutch-based WHI Clinical Coordinating Center, she continues to oversee the integration of many different studies within this large program focused on women’s health in later ages. She is also the Principal Investigator of two new national coordinating centers—one for an NHLBI-funded epidemiological cohort study among Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders (MOSAAIC) and the other for NCI’s Cancer Screening Research Network (CSRN) which is evaluating the new multicancer detection tests.
