Titles and Affiliations
Assistant Professor, Medical Oncology
American Association for Cancer Research
Research area
Improving outcomes for breast cancer patients in Rwanda by reducing stigma around the disease.
Impact
The burden of breast cancer is rising in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), where it is projected to become the leading cause of cancer mortality among women by 2030. Breast cancer treatment is increasingly available across SSA, yet a host of barriers prevent many women from accessing it. Breast cancer stigma has been identified as a major barrier and a primary reason why many SSA women are unwilling to receive curative breast cancer treatment. Both the cancer and related treatments such as mastectomy are heavily stigmatized in SSA, including in Rwanda, where patients often experience blame for their disease and survivors are ostracized within their families and communities. Dr. Fadelu’s AACR research supported by BCRF aims to develop effective interventions to reduce the drivers of breast cancer stigma and its impact on treatment uptake.
Progress Thus Far
Dr. Fadelu is building upon his previous work that identified stigma experiences of patient and caregivers to create an intervention named RISE—Resilience, Support and Exposure to mitigate stigma for use with patients and their caregivers. RISE combines resilience training for patients, support groups for caregivers, and exposure to video recordings of survivor and caregiver stories. Using community-based participatory research methods, Dr. Fadelu’s team has made substantial progress, securing research protocol approval in both Rwanda and at Dana-Farber, establishing an ongoing process of engagement with patients, caregivers, community members, and clinicians, and assembling a 14-member community advisory board. The team has finalized the resilience component, which will consist of four group sessions delivered at three-week intervals, each facilitated by a social worker and nurse and focused on a specific resilience skill such as coping and active stress relief. They have also produced a training manual and completed a pre-pilot training of eight social workers and nurses, whose feedback is now being used to refine the manual further. The team has also produced four survivor and caregiver videos in Kinyarwanda.
What’s next
Building on their progress developing and prototyping the RISE intervention components, Dr. Fadelu and his team will complete refinement of the resilience training manual and finalize the survivor and caregiver videos before moving to assess the implementation outcomes of the completed RISE stigma reduction intervention.
Biography
Temidayo Fadelu, MD is the Deputy Director of the Center for Global Health Equity in the Division of Population Sciences at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Fadelu’s research addresses global inequities in breast cancer. Originally from Nigeria, Dr. Fadelu completed college at Baylor University. He earned his medical degree from Yale University and completed internal medicine residency at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. His medical oncology fellowship was at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, during which he also earned a master’s in public health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School.
