Health of Women Study

In December of 2009, the Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation in collaboration with the Beckman Research Institute, City of Hope and the National Cancer Institute’s (NCI) Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG) launched the Health of Women Study (HOW) of the Army of Women.

We launched the HOW Study for YOU.

We know that many of our Army of Women members have been disappointed that they haven't received a Call-to-Action for a study that was the right fit for them. Well, instead of waiting for someone else to come up with just the right study, we thought it was time for us all to roll up our sleeves and push the research forward ourselves! We are inviting everyone to join us in a new approach to research that may tell us HOW breast cancer starts and HOW to prevent it—the Health of Women Study (HOW)! Every woman and man can take part in the HOW Study regardless of whether or not they have had breast cancer. You don't even have to leave your house to participate! The HOW Study is an on-line study!

Our hope is to enroll at least one million women and a few good men in the HOW Study.

The HOW Study is the first ever online "cohort" study of an anticipated one million women. A “cohort” is a study that looks at a group of people over time, collecting data that can be analyzed to find the common risk factors or characteristics. The HOW Study will be looking at breast cancer risk factors in order to understand the cause of the disease and ways to prevent it. The goal of the HOW Study is to follow all of you over time so that we get a better picture of what causes breast cancer. In order to do this, we need to compare those who have been diagnosed with breast cancer to those who have not. The HOW Study will ask you to answer questions about your health and health habits over time to give us a view of what people are doing and how their health is being affected. In addition, we will be asking specific questions of women and men living with breast cancer to give us ideas about what, beyond treatment, leads to long term survival as well as what the real long term side effects of current treatments are. Finally, this will be the study that addresses the questions you've been asking: is there an environmental cause of breast cancer? Are fertility drugs and bio-identical hormones safe? And what about deodorant and underwire bras?

As a member of the HOW Study and the Army of Women, participants will be receiving online "modules" that will ask key questions about their health and family history. Each new module is released as part of a "call to action" email. Each module will be dedicated to a specific topic, and the topics will include data about your health history, reproductive health, cancer history (for those with breast cancer) and much more. The modules will eliminate the need to ask every single question about your health history at once, which is the traditional way of doing this type of research and can be overwhelming for the user. Instead, the researchers plan to release a new module every two to three months. Each module should take about 15-20 minutes to complete.

Participants can choose to skip a module or to participate in all modules. They can fill out a module at a later time or catch up on several modules at once. As a member of the HOW Study and the Army of Women, YOU are in complete control and can self select what you want to take part in.

The launch of the HOW Study was a success. We have over 30,000 women and men who have signed up and submitted their health information to us. But because we are inventing a totally new way to do this type of research, we are making some changes to the study website and anticipate gearing up for another round of recruitment later this Spring. Stay tuned, and if you have any questions about the HOW study, please email us at how@dslrf.org.

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