Jen Bernat works in her office

With cancer affecting ever increasing numbers of people, one Purdue graduate student is studying "cancer worry" in order to make prevention techniques more effective.

Jennifer Bernat, a third-year Ph.D. candidate, says cancer worry is an emotional state that might be able to motivate people to do the cancer prevention techniques.

Bernat originally became interested in cancer worry when taking a class on cancer communication and control. She saw a commercial that was a part of the Gardasil shot campaign to help prevent cervical cancer. After seeing the commercial, a new project was born.

Bernat believes current campaigns are not targeting cancer worry. She said they might not contain enough fear appeals to motivate people to take part and would like to use her research findings to make campaigns for prevention techniques more influential.

Cancers that can be prevented or detected earlier account for 50 percent of all new cancer cases, according to the American Cancer Society. This means that her research could be very useful in limiting the number of new cancer cases.

Her original research was a survey about cancer worry in which 504 undergraduate students participated. Bernat, two other graduate students and their supervising professor conducted the survey and are still working on putting together the data. They hope to create a scale to measure cancer worry.

Bernat plans to do more in depth research in the coming year and hopes to be able to expand her research to other countries. She has received a fellowship from the National Science Foundation to conduct research in China this summer, where she will be working in Beijing with researchers from Tsinghua University.

Bernat also applied for a grant from the Purdue Research Foundation. This grant would fund research in Europe this fall, beginning at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KUL) in Belgium and possibly expanding to other countries such as Germany and France.

She hopes her research can have a significant impact on future campaigns for prevention and detection techniques.

"It is important to have this measure because we are trying to impact the prevention and detection stages because we want to prevent the treatment stage," Bernat said.

For more information on cancer worry, as well as other cancer topics, visit www.cancer.gov.