Lynne Wagner
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC·Psychology
Many breast cancer survivors live for years with fear of recurrence (FoR), a distressing worry that their cancer will come back. Long-term survivors name help with this fear as their most pressing unmet need.
- Fields
Psychology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Public Health & Epidemiology
- Topics
breast cancer survivors
fear of recurrence
FoR
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2029
What they work on
- Test whether FoRtitude 2.0, an 8-week online program teaching cognitive behavior therapy and health management strategies with telephone coaching, reduces fear of recurrence at 3 months more than an attention control or usual care in breast cancer survivors.
- Evaluate whether FoRtitude 2.0 improves anxiety, depression, health-related quality of life and fear-driven health care use among 800 survivors recruited from NCI Community Oncology Research Program sites.
- Explore whether FoRtitude 2.0 lowers allostatic load, a physiological marker of chronic stress, from baseline to 3 months compared with control conditions.
- Assess the program in a racially diverse sample by enrolling 300 Black and 500 non-Black breast cancer survivors and including culturally responsive intervention content.
More about the research
Cognitive behavior therapy (CBT), a talk therapy that teaches people to change unhelpful thoughts and behaviors, fits the problem well. But cost, time and a shortage of therapists keep many survivors from getting it. eHealth programs, delivered online, can get around these barriers.
Why it matters
Fear of recurrence is the top unmet need reported by long-term breast cancer survivors, and many cannot reach in-person therapy. If FoRtitude 2.0 proves effective, it could become a low-cost online program that community cancer clinics offer widely. It could ease fear, anxiety and depression, and may later be extended to survivors of other cancers.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Katie Devine
Rutgers University-New Brunswick, NJ·Psychology
Test whether Managing Your Health, a mobile app combined with six peer-mentor sessions, improves self-management behaviors and quality of life compared with educational control in a randomized trial of 300 childhood cancer survivors aged 18–25.
William Hundley
Virginia Commonwealth University, VA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Test whether a home-based, individually tailored physical activity program plus a healthy living intervention, compared with the healthy living intervention alone, preserves peak oxygen consumption in 150 women receiving anthracycline chemotherapy for breast cancer.
Anna Lau
University of California-Los Angeles, CA·Psychology
Test whether a tailored mindfulness program reduces emotion suppression, experiential avoidance and unmodulated perseverance among high-achieving, low-income Black, Latinx and Asian American students, compared with a study-skills control, in a 504-student randomized trial.
The school
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: 72 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 523 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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