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Post-Doctoral Fellow Crystal Chu Earns ‘Young Scholar’ Award From Medical Decision-Making Society
Post-doctoral fellow and RN to BSN and PhD program alumna Crystal Chu — who creates, deploys, and tests decision aids for women at risk for or facing breast cancer — earned the Society for Medical Decision Making's (SMDM) "Young Scholar Award" for 2024 at the group's annual meeting in Boston, Ma.
SMDM is a 1,000-member organization that promotes scientific and methodological rigor in healthcare decision research.
Chu, who earned a highly competitive $30,000 grant from the American Cancer Society to fund her work, "The Use of a Decision Aid for Contralateral Prophylactic Mastectomy" in 2020, has been busy since she earned a PhD in 2023. Part of the first cohort of post-doctoral scholars, she's one of a small but growing cohort of nurse scientists well-positioned to fill the growing demand for nurse researchers and academics.
Chu, with mentor Lynn Dengel, MD, UVA Health breast surgeon, and fellow nurse scientist Randy Jones, also developed, deployed, and tested a new decision-making aid to help women at high risk of breast cancer decide whether to add MRIs to their screening regimen, which proved popular with both patients and doctors alike in early testing.
The new tool is designed to assist women estimated to have a 20 percent or greater risk of developing breast cancer during their lifetimes. While magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) increases the odds of detecting breast cancer, it also comes with a significant risk of false positives. That can make for a difficult decision for high-risk women, who must balance their desire to catch cancer early with the potential stress and additional testing that follows a false positive.
“We aim to further develop the decision aid intervention so that patients in the breast care setting can have guided conversations to decide the best regimen for their needs and preferences,” Chu said. “The use of a decision aid can empower patients to make informed, shared decisions while receiving personalized, patient-centered care.”
[VIDEO] Regretting Double Mastectomies - Meet Crystal Chu, PhD, RN
