The Relevance of Fatalism in the Study of Latinas’ Cancer Screening Behavior: A Systematic Review of the Literature

# The Author(s) 2010. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Background Fatalism has been identified as a dominant belief among Latinos and is believed to act as a barrier to cancer prevention. However, controversy exists over the utility of the construct in explaining health disparities experienced by disadvantaged populations above the influence of structural barriers such as low socioeconomic status (SES) and limited access to health care. Purpose This paper reviews the empirical research on fatalism and Latinas ’ participation in cancer screening in an attempt to determine whether fatalism predicts participation in cancer screening after accounting for structural barriers

Cosmology with the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna

The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) has two scientific objectives of cosmological focus: to probe the expansion rate of the universe, and to understand stochastic gravitational-wave backgrounds and their implications for early universe and particle physics, from the MeV to the Planck scale. However, the range of potential cosmological applications of gravitational wave observations extends well beyond these two objectives. This publication presents a summary of the state of the art in LISA cosmology, theory and methods, and identifies new opportunities to use gravitational wave observations by LISA to probe the universe

Participation of low-income women in genetic cancer risk assessment and BRCA 1/2 testing: the experience of a safety-net institution

Some communities and populations lack access to genetic cancer risk assessment (GCRA) and testing. This is particularly evident in safety-net institutions, which serve a large segment of low-income, uninsured individuals. We describe the experience of a safety-net clinic with limited resources in providing GCRA and BRCA1/2 testing. We compared the proportion and characteristics of high-risk women who were offered and underwent GCRA and genetic testing. We also provide a description of the mutation profile for affected women. All 125 patients who were offered GCRA accepted to undergo GCRA. Of these, 72 % had a breast cancer diagnosis, 70 % were Hispanic, 52.8 % were non-English speakers, and 66 % did not have health insurance. Eighty four (67 %) were offered genetic testing and 81 (96 %) agreed. Hispanic women, those with no medical insurance, and those with a family history of breast cancer were significantly more likely to undergo testing (p > 0.01). Twelve of 81 (15 %) patients were found to have deleterious mutations, seven BRCA1, and five BRCA2. Our experience shows that it is possible to offer GCRA and genetic testing even in the setting of limited resources for these services. This is important given that a large majority of the low-income women in our study agreed to undergo counseling and testing. Our experience could serve as a model for similar low-resource safety-net health settings