Administrative Supplements for Assessing Capacity to Address Obesity for Cancer Prevention and Control

This application is being submitted in response to the Notice of Special Interest (NOSI) identified as NOT-CA-25-004. The proposed administrative supplement to the Karmanos Cancer Institute’s (KCI) Cancer Center Support Grant (P30CA022453-39). The prevalence of obesity in the city of Detroit and the surrounding catchment area is higher than the rest of the United States, reflecting higher obesity rates among its residents and parallel higher incidence and mortality for obesity-related cancers in this population. Detroit is resource challenged, and with that, many of its neighborhoods aren’t considered safe, which influences physical activity and it has been estimated more than 40% of its population has limited access to grocery stores or other sources of healthy foods. As physical inactivity and food / nutrition insecurity are important drivers of obesity, it is critical that we develop and implement strategies to reverse these trends. We have assembled a multidisciplinary team of researchers with a track record of community-based participatory and interventional research aimed to increase physical activity and promote healthy diets to reduce obesity and improve outcomes in both cancer and non-cancer populations of all ages. We propose to lay the foundation for a Whole Systems Approach (WSA) to reducing obesity in the city of Detroit. We will accomplish this by: 1) leveraging existing area-based data on obesity, physical inactivity, food/nutrition insecurity and cancer to understand modifiable neighborhood characteristics tied to obesity and cancer; 2) conducting an environmental scan of key collaborators and policy in the city of Detroit relevant to obesity with emphasis on physical activity and nutrition security using rapid qualitative assessment (RQA); and 3) convening a workgroup composed of key collaborators and apply qualitative methods of discovery to explore the characteristics of an appropriate WSA effort to address obesity and local capacity to support a WSA effort.