California Teachers Study

Study Overview

One of the major advances in lymphoma research has been the understanding that lymphomas are comprised of many different sub-types. Within each recognized lymphoma sub type, there have been clinical advances showing that there are different molecular characteristics in the tumor that have different survival attributes. 

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This newly funded project will examine the causes of non-Hodgkin lymphoma and is a collaboration between five cohort studies: the California Teachers Study, the American Cancer Society’s Cancer Prevention Study II, the Harvard cohorts (Nurses’ Health Study 1 and 2, Physicians Health Study, and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study), and the Kaiser Permanente Southern California cohort.

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How to Participate

​Recruitment for this study is now closed.

If you have been diagnosed with or treated for non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL), all we will need is your permission to obtain a small sample of tissue from the hospital where you were diagnosed or treated. This tissue may have been removed during a surgical or biopsy procedure.

 

To provide permission, you simply read and sign a consent and HIPAA form and mail it back to us.  With your signed consent, we can then request the tissue from the appropriate facility. 

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Scientific Significance

By collecting lymphoma tissues, we will be able to understand whether these different molecular characteristics are due to different risk factors.  By linking the tissue collection and resulting tumor characterization with your questionnaire data from the last 20 years, we will examine whether potential lymphoma risk factors (e.g., obesity, diabetes, immune conditions, ultraviolet radiation, infections) not only result in different lymphoma subtypes, but whether they result in different molecular characteristics in the tumor. 

 

It is our hope that knowledge generated from this study will help advance lymphoma prevention efforts and future efforts in targeted therapy.

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