Olney Relay For Life May 31 at Sandy Springs Friends School - Remember Loved Ones and Light a Luminary

Overnight Event will “Celebrate, Remember & Fight Back”Against Cancer - ACS research grantee Ashley Varner to speak about brain cancer and caregivers at 2:30 p.m.   Info at: www.Relayforlife.org/olneymd

Join several hundred participants to fight back against cancer with moving ceremonies and activities at the American Cancer Society's Relay For Life of Olney at Sandy Spring Friends School, 16923 Sandy Springs Road.  There will be a Survivors dinner, Survivors lap and a Luminaria ceremony at 9 p.m. Participants circle a track surrounded by glowing Luminaria bearing the names of loved ones lost to cancer and those still fighting cancer.  People in our community are welcome to form a team, attend any part of the event, and participate in the Luminaria Ceremony. Luminaria may be purchased for just $10 each to honor someone battling cancer or pay tribute to a loved one’s memory.

Because cancer never sleeps, Relay For Life events go overnight.  Participants camp at a local school, park, or fairground, and take turns walking or running a track or path.  Entertainment and games help keep teams going all evening.  Funds raised through Relay For Life support ACS’s mission to find cures, provide services for cancer patients and their families, and help finish the fight against cancer.  Dr. Gordy Klatt, a cancer physician in Takoma, Washington, created Relay For Life in 1985 by walking and running a track for 24 hours to raise funds to fight cancer.  Relay For Life has become a phenomenon and is the largest fundraising event in the U.S., taking place in more than 5,000 communities with approximately 4 million participants.  Relay for Life events “Celebrate, Remember, and Fight Back.” 

CONTACT:    Najia Hassan, ACS Relay For Life specialist, 301-562-3616 or Najia.hassan@cancer.org

Special guest speaker Ashley Varner, MSW, MBA of Catholic University in Washington, D.C., will speak at 2:30 p.m. about her Ph.D. research work to study quality of life for brain cancer caregivers.  She was recently awarded a $40,000 grant from the American Cancer Society, which is the largest non-governmental funder of cancer research in the U.S.  In fact since 1946, ACS has invested more than $3.9 billion in cancer research and has been part of almost every major breakthrough in the field of cancer.   

Here is more about Ms. Varner’s research:  An informal caregiver is defined as “anyone who provides physical, emotional, spiritual, financial, or logistical support to a loved one with a chronic, disabling, or life-threatening illness” (The Wellness Community, 2009, p. 2). For the majority of the nearly 1.6 million people in whom cancer will be diagnosed in 2011 and the nearly 22,000 individuals diagnosed with primary malignant brain tumors (PMBTs) each year, at least one friend or family member will assume the role of informal cancer caregiver.

Studies indicate that the role requirements for informal cancer caregivers can include the functions of nurse, guardian, behavior manager, companion, comforter, maid, safety officer, administrator, chief financial officer, key decision maker, family counselor, liaison with health care professionals, and social worker. One researcher observed that because cancer diagnoses are unexpected, cancer caregivers are usually thrust into their new role without warning. Importantly, often, cancer caregivers do not consciously recognize their role as caregiver. 

Cancer caregivers have been found to have a variety of health concerns including increased incidence of disturbed sleep, anxiety and depression, and poor health compared to their non-caregiving counterparts. In spite of wide-spread recognition that cancer caregivers are likely to experience distress as a result of their caregiving role, interventions to alleviate the distress of cancer caregivers have received relatively little study.

Informal caregivers of individuals with primary malignant brain tumors (PMBTs) experience unique sources of stress in addition to the stressors common to all cancer caregivers. Caregivers of persons with PMBTs must cope not only with possible functional status changes of their care recipients due to paralysis or paresis, decreased level of consciousness, ataxia, and/or difficulty swallowing, but also with alterations in cognitive and neuropsychiatric status. Caregivers of those with PMBTs have reported their sense that he or she loses their loved one twice: the first time when their care recipient experiences cognitive changes that make them a “different person” than they were before the PMBT became symptomatic, and the second time when their loved one dies.

Evidence-based practices that reduce the distress of cancer caregivers have been identified, few, if any, evidence-based interventions specifically for informal caregivers of individuals with PMBTs have been developed or studied. This study will use a mixture of qualitative and quantitative research methods to develop, pilot, and evaluate an intervention for the caregivers of individuals with PMBTs with the goal of increasing the quality of life of both the caregiver and the care-receiver, decreasing the distress of the caregiver, and increasing the self-efficacy of the caregiver.