Understanding the limits of large datasets.

Many health professionals use large datasets to answer behavioral, translational, or clinical questions. Understanding the impact of missing data in large databases, such as disease registries, can avoid erroneous interpretations of these data. Using the California Cancer Registry, the authors selected seven common cancers, seven sociodemographic and clinical variables, and the top three reporting sources, as examples of the type of data that would be deemed critical to most studies.

Health journalism internships: a social marketing strategy to address health disparities.

The USA seeks to eliminate health disparities by stimulating the rapid uptake of health-promoting behaviors within disadvantaged communities. A health journalism internship incorporates social marketing strategies to increase communities' access to cancer information, while helping the interns who are recruited from underrepresented communities gain admission to top graduate schools. Interns are taught basic health journalism skills that enable them to create immediate streams of cancer-related press releases for submission to community newspapers.

Racial/ethnic and gender disparities in renal cell carcinoma incidence and survival.

Purpose: We used a population based cancer registry to examine trends in renal cell carcinoma incidence and survival among 4 racial/ethnic groups (white, black, Hispanic and Asian/Pacific Islander) and both genders.

Materials And Methods: Race/ethnicity, gender, age, staging, length of survival and cause of death data were analyzed using 39,434 cases of renal cell carcinoma from 1988 to 2004 from the California Cancer Registry. Annual age adjusted incidence rates and relative survival rates were calculated for the racial/ethnic and gender groups.