Q&A with Dr. Tracy Crane

Sylvester's Director of Lifestyle Medicine investigates the critical role of nutrition and exercise in cancer prevention, treatment outcomes, and long-term quality of life.

Dr. Tracy E. Crane, RDN, believes that personalized nutrition and exercise programs should be part of the prescribed treatment for people with cancer or at high risk for cancer. Her goal is to conduct cutting-edge clinical trials that lead to personalized lifestyle strategies for patients that improve outcomes.

Currently, Dr. Crane is co-leader of the Cancer Control Program and Director of Lifestyle Medicine, Prevention, and Digital Health at Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, part of the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. Things are going well. and positioning the cancer center to be recognized as a national leader in lifestyle medicine.

We recently spoke with Dr. Crane, who holds an associate appointment in kinesiology and public health and is an associate professor of medical oncology at the Miller School, to learn more about what motivates her and how her research has evolved. We spoke to her about what she's been up to, and what she feels is her greatest professional accomplishment.

Dr. Crane, what motivates you?

My motivation begins with this compelling statistic. More than 40% of all cancers could be avoided if people ate healthier, were more physically active, and reached a healthy weight, but all these factors are within our control. can.

Knowing this will help improve people's lives, whether they are at high risk due to genetic mutations, have not yet developed cancer, or have cancer. There is now a motivation to understand exactly how people can incorporate lifestyle factors that they can control to reduce the potential negative effects of cancer. Individuals undergoing treatment for cancer or long-term cancer survivors.

Some of the questions we ask at Crane Lab include:

• How can specific eating patterns and exercise programs be used to reduce or prevent fatigue, nausea, and other known side effects of certain cancer treatments?
• Given each person's unique needs, what are the best nutrition and exercise interventions?
• Who would benefit most from lifestyle support provided via a wearable device like a Fitbit or supportive text messages, or one-on-one training sessions?

You leveraged wearables and other digital technologies in your research and created My Wellness Research Platform. Why is digital technology so important in your activities?

Digital technology is changing the research landscape, and we aim to be a leader in digitally driven lifestyle medicine research and care.

I discovered the utility of digital solutions more than 10 years ago during the Improving Survival through Lifestyle Interventions in Ovarian Cancer (LIVES) study. This study is the largest non-pharmacological trial for ovarian cancer, involving more than 1,200 participants. This involved more than 100 cancer centers across the country recruiting patients. However, the intervention was centralized in one place, and I was responsible for the implementation and fidelity of this lifestyle intervention.

I needed a way to make this telephone-based intervention cost-effective and efficient to monitor large groups of participants. As a result, we built cloud-based technology that allows us to digitally record telephone sessions to monitor interventions and support study management.

These telephone recordings were important for monitoring fidelity, but some of them contained a treasure trove of rarely used data.

At that time, I received a grant from the National Cancer Institute to observe these conversations on an individual level, to better understand how behavior change occurs, and to identify the need for a change in coaching to a different approach. We built a natural language processing model that helps predict who will be affected and identify interventionists. People who need retraining.

When I built My Wellness Research here at Sylvester, one of the key requirements was to record intervention sessions to monitor the protocol, and also to help people who speak different languages ​​and face different symptoms. It was about better understanding subtle information such as how to work with people who are doing the same thing. ?

Add to this data from a remote monitoring device like a Fitbit and you get the idea. We are moving away from a one-size-fits-all approach and building a comprehensive picture of each individual so that we can begin to prescribe and deliver the interventions that are most appropriate for each individual.

What do you like most about your job?

I loved designing intervention trials and sitting between technology and lifestyle behavior change research and seeing these two very different sciences come together to solve problems. This brings together the most interesting and interdisciplinary team, from whom I have learned a lot over the years.

Please tell us about the potential impact of your current research.

I think there are two main areas where our research will have the most impact. First, the work in our lab is innovative, combining data and computational science with more traditional behavioral science for lifestyle medicine.

Sylvester is committed to rapidly translating advances in lifestyle medicine into clinical practice and is one of the few cancer centers committed to doing this at scale. The integrations Sylvester provides span from prevention to survivorship research and beyond, and are generated and answered in conjunction with computational science and cutting-edge research produced by the Sylvester Data Portal and four scientific research programs. This brings with it endless research questions.

Another area that is likely to change current practice is the work we do during cancer treatment for patients with lymphoma and ovarian cancer. These two trials, LIFE-L and TEAL, are testing whether diet and exercise can improve patients' ability to deliver on time, receive treatment doses, and reduce side effects. I believe that what we are learning in these trials is a paradigm shift that will change the way care is delivered.

What are your goals at Sylvester?

My goal is for the research and resulting interventions from the Crane Lab to lead to maximizing patient outcomes across the cancer continuum and be incorporated into clinical care. Our Prevention and Survivorship Clinic has an evidence-based program that provides patients with a cancer diagnosis with a customized prescription of lifestyle medicine with unique nutrition and exercise interventions. A treatment plan will be provided.

And, perhaps most importantly, I want to give back to the next generation of scientists and help them continue this research and ensure a path that leads to discoveries we haven't yet dreamed of. That's it.

tag: Dr. Tracy Crane, Silver Star Comprehensive Cancer Center, Nutrition