Professional Title:
Graduate Student, School of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts
Bio:
The current phase of the study has focused on recruiting participants from Central Valley cities and towns (e.g., Modesto, Ceres, Atwater, Sonora, Merced). Â Efforts have included community outreach to locally organized groups, agencies, and health care facilities. A goal of this study phase is to obtain a sample of men that reflect the diversity of the region in terms of race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status. Corona will focus on patterns and predictors of sleep quality in men with prostate cancer. Research findings suggest that cancer patients suffer disproportionately higher rates of sleep problems in comparison to the general population. This is a particularly pervasive problem following treatment for prostate cancer.
Dysregulated sleep can negatively affect the psychological and physical well-being of cancer survivors over time. It will be especially important to examine sleep disturbance within a health disparities framework. Â Sleep quality is particularly sensitive to psychological stress. Chronic stress experienced by individuals with lower levels of resources (e.g., lower SES, poorer healthcare access, etc.) may place some cancer survivors at risk for higher levels of dysregulated sleep and ultimately poorer physical and psychological outcomes. Â Therefore, during the COE participation year Corona will focus on the investigation of the psychosocial factors that contribute to the regulation of sleep patterns in a diverse sample of men with prostate cancer from the Central Valley.
