Prevention

Women whose family members or friends died of cancer were far more likely to approach prevention aggressively than were those whose loved ones survived the disease, found a team of researchers at The Ohio State University.

“The cancer of someone you care about is a lens through which you interpret your own risk,” says Tasleem Padamsee, PhD, an assistant professor of health services management and policy at the College of Public Health and lead author of the study, which appears in the Journal of Health Psychology.

Sesen Paulos was yet another undecided student at Ohio State.

It was 2011 and Paulos wasn’t certain which major would merge her interests in social and natural sciences. That was until the College of Public Health introduced its Bachelor of Science in Public Health program.

Once she enrolled, Paulos never looked back. She engaged in several extra-curricular activities, learned French and studied abroad in India to prepare for her one major goal: joining the Peace Corps.