Gerson Peltz, MD, PHD, University of Texas at Brownsville, HBCU/MI Partnership Training Award: This project that has been funded by the Department of Defense is intended to answer some questions about the low incidents of breast cancer among Hispanic women. I should say lower than Caucasian and African-Americans, but not low.

Maureen Sanderson, PHD, Formerly at University of Texas School of Public Health, HBCU/MI Partnership Training Award: This is of interest because even though these women share some of the same risk factors, they are not getting the disease. And even when they do get the disease and they get in late for screening, and they are diagnosed with later stages of the disease, they are not dying from the disease, so what is it? What is it about these women that is protecting them from breast cancer? And that's the way that we wrote our application was we really want to find out what it is that Hispanic women are doing right with regard to breast cancer.

Gerson Peltz, MD, PHD: So we developed a clinical study to investigate risk factors and protective factors of breast cancer in Hispanic women involving 1,500 women in South Texas. 500 of them with breast cancer and 1,000 of them with no cancer, just to serve as control - high risk control and low risk control. So we can compare the three groups in terms of very well known risk factors for breast cancer, such as physical activity, alcohol intake, smoking, and some other familiar aspects associated with breast cancer as well as some diet components and body composition analysis. It has been shown that when you collect fat in the central area of the body, in the abdominal area of the body, then that's when you see the correlation of obesity and chronic diseases - such as hypertension, stroke, myocardial infarction, type 2 diabetes, and certain types of cancer.

Maureen Sanderson, PHD: We know there have been recent studies that indicate that there might be an increased risk for breast cancer associated with diabetes and insulin resistance (a predecessor of diabetes) and yet we know that Hispanic women have fairly high rates of diabetes relative to white women and yet if there is a connection between diabetes and breast cancer we would expect to see high rates of breast cancer as well, but we don't. We did do the study and found that there was a 30% reduced risk of breast cancer associated with diabetes in our population, which is kind of strange considering that other studies have found an increased risk. Then we wanted to know, OK, well, if we are seeing this reduced risk associated with diabetes does physical activity interfere with that at all, i.e. if they exercise and they are diabetic they are at really reduced risk of breast cancer, and that is exactly what we saw. So in women who had diabetes and did not engage in physical activity there was pretty much no association for breast cancer, but in women who had the diabetes and participated in physical activity there was a greatly reduced risk of breast cancer. And we don't know why. At this point we are out there trying to figure out if this association is real, we will have to repeat it with larger studies and see if this association is real and try to hypothesis why that's happening.

Gerson Peltz, MD, PHD: This research is basically a partnership between UT Brownsville, University of Texas, Brownsville and the University of Texas, Houston School of Public Health at Brownsville. So it's a collaboration, it's the result of a collaboration between the two institutions, UT Houston as the mentor institution and UT Brownsville as the training institution.

Maureen Sanderson, PHD: I had had the DoD funding previously and I was familiar with the procedures and was able to kind of hit the ground running. And thought lets identify some researchers from University of Texas Brownsville and see who (and Dr. Peltz stepped forward as did several others) was interested in learning how to conduct breast cancer research and that was of interest to me because I had had funding through DoD through career development and had been mentored through that mechanism and I was anxious to try and do that as well for some faculty from University of Texas Brownsville.