Impact of Remote Familial Colorectal Cancer Assessment and Counseling

The rate of adherence to regular colonoscopy screening (CS) among members of families at increased risk for colorectal cancer (CRC) is far below recommended levels. Persons who live in rural areas of the United States exhibit lower CRC screening rates than their urban counterparts. Although the detection of familial predisposition to cancer begins with an accurate family medical history, data indicate that many patients do not receive adequate familial cancer risk assessment from their primary care providers. This suggests that familial risk is largely unrecognized which may lead to inadequate risk stratification, lack of risk notification, appropriate risk counseling, suboptimal cancer screening and preventable deaths. Because of geographic and system-level barriers, special efforts are needed to improve access to personalized risk communication and adherence to CRC screening to rural and other geographically underserved populations at increased risk for CRC. In the proposed study, we will evaluate a novel telephone-based, theory-guided personalized risk communication intervention that combines a familial CRC risk assessment and behavioral counseling with tailored messages. The key hypothesis guiding this study is that a multifaceted personalized risk communication intervention will improve CS at a significantly higher rate than a mailed targeted print intervention.

Our integrative study model specifies important theoretical mechanisms that can contribute to increased use of CS among persons at increased risk. We will enroll 438 adult men and women between the ages of 30-74 who are considered at increased risk of familial CRC into this 2-group randomized trial. The primary aim of this study is to compare colonoscopy use among participants in the two groups. Secondary aims are to compare the two groups with regard to cognitive and emotional outcomes and explore the underlying mechanisms through which the interventions have an impact on colonoscopy behavior. Sociodemographic, clinical, behavioral and psychosocial measures will be collected from participants at baseline, and 1 month, 9 months, and 15 months following the intervention. Self-reported colonoscopy is verified with medical records.

The study's findings will have both theoretical, as well as practical significance. Our findings will help to influence the selection and dissemination of effective outreach approaches to improve CRC screening in populations at increased risk for the disease. These results have broad applicability to understanding responses to personalized risk communication interventions for other diseases as well. Findings will also broaden our understanding of the underlying theoretical mechanisms of how remote cancer risk communications lead to improvements in cancer screening among geographically underserved populations if such intervention effects are observed.

In addition to studying the intervention effects in rural areas, we will enroll participants in urban areas. These enhancements to our population-based randomized behavioral trial will provide us with an unprecedented opportunity to assess reach and determine if there are differential intervention effects (i.e., efficacy) with regard to place of residence (rurality vs. urbanicity.)