California Teachers Study

A new CTS study published in the Journal of the American Heart Association found that study participants who drank one or more sugar-sweetened beverages each day had a 20% greater likelihood of having cardiovascular disease, compared with participants who didn't drink or rarely drank sugar-sweetened beverages.

The next part in this series introduces an exciting new frontier in epidemiology.
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"James Lacey, Ph.D., fresh off a conference call, walks quickly through a maze of cubicles inside a nondescript, beige building on the City of Hope campus. He stops at a small office occupied by two co-workers, his face bright with excitement.

“If there was an epidemiology version of a SAG award or an Oscar,” said a breathless Lacey, director of the Division of Cancer Etiology at City of Hope. “That would win it for this year.”

The National Cancer Institute (NCI) has awarded more than $12 million to City of Hope to support the landmark California Teachers Study (CTS). The five-year NCI award will fund the CTS’s innovative approach of using secure, cloud-based data management and technology to conduct large-scale cancer epidemiology research.

New research by the California Teachers Study, published in Breast Cancer Research, found that California Teachers Study participants who took three or more tablets of low-dose aspirin a week had a reduced risk of breast cancer. The reduced risk was particularly evident in women with the hormone receptor-positive/HER2-negative subtype.

Part 2 of this series explores the seminal finding that helped give the CTS its start:

"News about breast cancer,” was the introduction from Monica Gayle, a "CBS Morning News" anchor, during a 1994 broadcast. “Young women can reduce their chance of getting the deadly disease with just a little exercise.”

...The gleam of the news media — on CBS, "Good Morning America," "The Today Show," and in most major newspapers across the country — was shining on a young biostatistician and cancer researcher named Leslie Bernstein, Ph.D., who, two years later, would help launch the California Teachers Study, a seminal study involving more than 133,000 teachers."

The final installment of this series explores new opportunities on the horizon for cancer research.

"It is part of an attitude and mantra that Lacey and his colleagues in the Department of Population Sciences at City of Hope call, “Meeting people where they are.” It is about injecting more realism into cancer prevention — making it less about perfect adherence to rules about what to eat, what not to eat — what to do and not do — and more about carving a plan out of honest self-assessment."

For the first time ever, take an in depth look at the people and stories behind the California Teachers Study. Part 1 of this 5 part series explores the story of Dr. Leslie Bernstein and the hypothesis that would lead to the founding of the California Teachers Study:

"In 1950, in a social studies class at Hughes Junior High School in Long Beach, California, a term paper written by an eighth grader hinted at the beginning — close to 45 years later — of a transformative study about breast cancer."