Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Over the past two decades, medical advancements have significantly improved the chances of surviving cancer. However, as cancer survivors live longer, they face greater risks of experiencing additional health issues, notably late-onset heart diseases. Although we understand that maintaining a healthy lifestyle can help reduce heart disease risks, little is known about how cancer survivors manage their heart health and how they utilize the healthcare system over time after treatments (referred to as the care pathways). Additionally, cancer survivors' neighborhood and social environments may also play a role in their heart health. Factors like poverty and access to green spaces could influence how well cancer survivors maintain their heart health, but research on this is still limited. This research aims to fill this gap by investigating cancer survivors' heart health care pathways over time and how neighborhoods might affect their care. Phase I will focus on understanding the heart health care pathways of cancer survivors and compare them to those of individuals without a cancer history. Phase II will explore how cancer survivors' neighborhood and social environment factors influence heart health. This research will use long-term health data from a cohort of approximately 4000 adult cancer survivors in Québec, Canada. We will compare heart health scores and care pathways with those of another group without cancer. We will also use data from the Canadian Urban Environmental Health Research Consortium to understand cancer survivors' neighborhood and social characteristics. Advanced statistical methods will be applied to analyze the data and ensure that results are meaningful. By improving our understanding of the links between cancer survivorship, heart health, and the neighborhood and social environments people live in, this research will inform us how to build personalized care plans and strategies to lessen the risk of developing heart diseases in cancer survivors.