Chi-Chen Hong, PHD, Roswell Park Cancer Institute, Postdoctoral-Multidisciplinary Award:

I received from the DoD a multidisciplinary postdoctoral award and it's really benefited my research because it pretty much started my research.

I am working on a project that's looking at determinants of weight gain in women with breast cancer and this is an interesting issue because a lot of women do gain -- about 50-95 percent of women will gain weight after they are diagnosed with breast cancer and that's a significant problem.

The type of weight gain that these women have, they will tend to lose lean body mass and they will gain the amount of fat they have. And, so we are trying to figure out what causes this weight gain. And, so the research that's gone on before they have looked at a number of issues. They looked at clinical issues such as their treatment regimens, how much exercise they get, fatigue, and so forth. A lot of these studies have been really small and so what we've tried to do is build a really comprehensive study that has a larger group of women and trying to look at the issue very broadly. Looking at things like genetics, psychosocial issues, and how that relates to weight gain. And, so one of our hypothesis is that sex hormones - we know that sex hormones is important in weight, or determining weight. And, so what we're thinking is that with chemotherapy there is a decline in ovarian function and there is a decline in estrogen's - and that's across all women. So what we're thinking is that perhaps other systems -- physiological systems, hormonal systems -- that are important with weight, may be more important in determining who gains weight and who doesn't gain weight. So, we're looking at things like IGF-1 insulin, which is important in maintaining lean body tissue, we are also looking at cortisol levels because cortisol, if it is unopposed by estrogens and IGF will cause users to gain weight around the middle and it will cause you to increase obesity in general.

So, we're looking at things like depression after women are diagnosed. We are looking at their support systems and so forth and how that relates potentially to cortisol levels as an indicator of stress and then to weight gain afterwards.

So the DoD multidisciplinary post-doc has really helped me in my career because it has allowed me to start a research program at a post-doc level which is great because you get a head start in generating data that you can use later on in your independent career and I would have to say that this allowed me to actually transition into an independent career, so its been great.