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Are You or Your Sister in the Sister Study? Read this
By Lydia Fong
Tens of thousands of women have enrolled in the Sister Study, a federal research project involving healthy women whose sisters have had breast cancer. Now researchers want input from participants’ sisters who were diagnosed with breast cancer before age 50 and within the last four years. Women in this new study—the Two Sister Study—will answer phone interviews and submit saliva samples for DNA analysis.
“We can learn about environmental factors by comparing the affected sister and the unaffected sister to see if there are any systematic differences between them,” says principal study leader Clarice Weinberg, PhD.
The original Sister Study has almost reached its goal of 50,000 participants, but researchers are still looking for healthy non-Caucasian sisters between ages 35 and 74, as well as Caucasian women who are either between 55 and 74 or do not have bachelor’s degrees. Visit SisterStudy.org or call 1-877-4SISTER.
