Olufunmilayo Olopade Quotes

We need to accelerate prevention that can be adopted in low-resource settings or adopted in this country as a way to help low-income women care for themselves.

Right now, most women in the world are diagnosed with breast cancer at an advanced stage.

To develop a personalized way to identify every woman at high risk, whether African-American or Jewish or Italian or Ukrainian, so that they could go in and have their doctor develop a personalized approach for them.

These cancers may be more common among African-American women, but our discovery was really that there are genetic risk factors for breast cancer in all populations.

There have been very few studies of women across different populations, so that’s why everyone has focused on my work,. But there are women all over the world Indian women, Hispanic women who develop triple-negative breast cancer, and most of these women didn’t know they were at risk for it.

One of the things that our hospital is doing is engaging community health workers and engaging community participants to participate in what I call population risk and health management that no health system can afford to spend so much money waiting for patients to get sick, and then bring them into the hospital. We have got to be in the community. I'm hoping that what we are going to be doing as part of our rollout in our comprehensive cancer center is to work with our hospital, to work with Brenda Battle. Brenda Battle is [now the senior vice president, Community Health Transformation, Chief Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Officer at UChicago Medicine]. She is part of a specialized program of research excellence in breast cancer health disparities.

When I learned that more than 30,000 women in California had joined, and that only 48 Black women in California—or African American women—had joined, that's when I said to Laura [Laura Esserman, MD, MBA, co-investigator and professor at UCSF], “This is unacceptable. You have to come to Chicago, and then we have to open this up nationwide so that an and then we have to open this up nationwide so that any woman who is going to get a mammogram can join.” For me, what I wanted to do is to bring it to the South Side of Chicago in a predominantly African American community, and we wanted to make sure that everyone in our community has a chance to join WISDOM if they wish to. We have found that when you ask women to participate, and they learn about the study, they sign up. And that's what I have learned since 2016. And the reason why women don't sign up for studies is because we didn't ask them, or we didn't make it easy for them to join. So I'm really looking forward to finding out with 100,000 women what's the safest and best factors to use to screen for breast cancer.