Nina Kadan-Lottick, MD, MSPH

Mentor

Robert Schultz, MD

Project Description

Dr. Schultz, her mentor reports: "Dr. Kadan-Lottick has made excellent progress in achieving the aims of her K12 award in her two primary research projects. The prospective, longitudinal study of psychosocial outcomes in children undergoing therapy for acute lymphoblastic leukemia is being accomplished with the NCI-funded Children’s Oncology Group clinical trial consortium. The study is actively recruiting patients. So far, 72 of the goal of 135 patients have enrolled. There is a lower rate of patient accrual than expected because the eligibility requirements for the leukemia treatment protocol, to which our study is linked, is more restrictive than we had originally anticipated. We therefore successfully added an additional 19 sites to the current 19 sites participating. We anticipate completing enrollment during the next 6-9 months and will complete the data analysis within the next 12 months of the evaluation at the first time point. Dr. Kadan-Lottick’s second study is to test the integrity of the parietal-frontal lobe system by examining brain structure and functional MRI signal intensity in children previously treated for cancer, with a history of neurotoxic therapy, who have impaired attention and working memory. This study has enrolled 18 patients to date who have each received comprehensive neurocognitive testing. These patients were waiting delivery of a a specially-made MRI head coil to be adapted to the Yale research MRI so that diffusion tensor imaging can also be done with participants. This special devise was just received and we anticipate doing the neuroimaging studies during the summer of 2007. In addition, Dr. Kadan-Lottick has published two manuscripts and presented three abstracts at national research meetings."

Publications

1. Oeffinger KC, Mertens AC, Sklar CA, Kawashima T, Hudson MM, Meadows AT, Friedman DL, Marina N, Hobbie W, Kadan-Lottick NS, Schwartz CL, Leisenring W, Robison LL. Chronic Health Conditions in Adult Survivors of Childhood Cancer. N Engl J Med. 2006 Oct 12;355(15):1572-82.
2. Mertens AC, Sencer S, Myers CD, Recklitis C, Kadan-Lottick N, Whitton J, Marina N, Robison LL, Zeltzer L. Complementary and alternative therapy use in adult survivors of childhood cancer: A report from the Childhood Cancer Survivor Study. Pediatr Blood Cancer 2007 March 15; [Epub ahead of print]
3. Kadan-Lottick N. The Epidemiology of Childhood Cancer. In the 18th Edition of Nelson Textbook of Pediatrics. 2005 In press.
4. Kadan-Lottick N, Neglia JP, Mertens AC. Late Effects of Childhood Cancer Therapy. In the textbook of Childhood Cancer. 2006. In press.

Source(s) of Support

NIH Yale K12 Clinical Research
Training Program
4th year