Abstract C080: A successful culturally tailored intervention to empower low-income Asian American women to conduct human papillomavirus self-sampling test
Authors: Ma Grace X , Zhai Shumenghui , Zhu Lin , Lin TImmy , Tan Yin , Fang Carolyn , Belinson Jerome L , Wang Minqi 
Published: September 2020

Background: Asian American women face disproportionate burden of cervical cancer (CC) than do non-Hispanic white women in the United States. Human papillomavirus (HPV) screening rates are still relative low among first-generation immigrant women and those with low socioeconomic status. Self-sampling for HPV is a convenient and cost-effective way to increase screening, especially among the low-income and underserved populations. This study aims to assess the impact of a culturally-tailored intervention to promote HPV self-sampling among low-income Asian American women. Methods: We adopted the community-based participatory research (CBPR) approach to conduct this efficacy study. A total of 156 female participants from three ethnic groups, Chinese (56), Korean (50), and Vietnamese (50) were recruited from community-based organizations (CBOs) such as churches and community centers in the greater Philadelphia metropolitan area. All participants received educations on HPV symptoms, transmissions, and screening, through workshops and group discussions at the CBOs. The workshops included handouts, lectures, and a demonstration on conducting a self-sampling HPV test in Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese languages. Participants were also given self-sampling kits and were contacted 30 days post intervention (booster contact). Results: The majority of the sample was Asian American women with low annual household income (62.3% earned less than $20,000) and low educational attainment (61.3% without a college degree). We used paired sample t-tests to assess the differences between baseline and post-intervention for knowledge, social support, self-efficacy, and comfortability conducting a HPV self-sample test. We found significant increase in participants’ knowledge on HPV (baseline: 2.83, post: 4.89, p &lt;0.001), social support (baseline: 3.91, post: 4.09, p &lt;0.001), self-efficacy (baseline: 3.05, post: 3.59, p &lt;0.001), and comfortability conducting a HPV self-sample test (baseline: 3.62, post: 4.06, p &lt;0.001). Within 6 months post intervention, all (100%) participants completed the HPV self-sampling test and returned the kits, which were then sent to the lab for analysis. Conclusion: To the best of our knowledge, this is the first intervention to promoted HPV self-sampling among Asian American women. Our findings showed that culturally tailored messages and hands-on demonstrations of the self-sampling kits were highly effective in empowering low-income Asian immigrant women to conduct HPV self-sampling tests. Acknowledgement This study is partially supported by the faculty research funds under the Center for Asian Health, Temple University (PI: Grace X. Ma, PhD). It is also partially supported by the grant of U54 CA221704(5) funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) of NIH (Contact PIs: Grace X. Ma, PhD and Olorunseun O. Ogunwobi, MD, PhD). The contents of this abstract are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of NIMHD or the NCI, NIH.

Citation Format: Grace X Ma, Shumenghui Zhai, Lin Zhu, TImmy Lin, Yin Tan, Carolyn Fang, Jerome L Belinson, Minqi Wang. A successful culturally tailored intervention to empower low-income Asian American women to conduct human papillomavirus self-sampling test [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the Twelfth AACR Conference on the Science of Cancer Health Disparities in Racial/Ethnic Minorities and the Medically Underserved; 2019 Sep 20-23; San Francisco, CA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2020;29(6 Suppl_2):Abstract nr C080.