Q and A with Intervention Researcher Taghrid Asfar, M.D.
The University of Miami Miller School of Medicine public health professor cuts cancer risk by helping people quit tobacco and understand alcohol risks.
Reducing smoking, vaping and alcohol use is an enormous public health challenge. Taghrid Asfar, M.D., M.S.P.H., studies how to tackle that challenge effectively.
Dr. Asfar, a researcher at Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, part of the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, aims to reduce people’s cancer risk by developing and testing health communication strategies and behavioral interventions. In 2022, she was named Sylvester’s Outstanding Population Science Researcher of the Year.
Dr. Asfar, also a professor of public health sciences at the Miller School, discusses her work in the following interview, which has been edited for length and clarity.
Tell us about your role at Sylvester and your research focus.
In my role as the translational science leader for Sylvester’s thoracic group, I have the privilege of guiding and shaping scientific strategies that bridge the gap between fundamental research in the laboratory and practical applications in clinical settings, as well as potential interventions at the population level.
My research focus is on cancer prevention. My research explores the lifestyle factors that play a crucial role in influencing cancer risk, particularly focusing on smoking and alcohol consumption. I aim to foster the development of health communication and behavioral intervention strategies to help individuals make informed choices about their health and well-being.
How did you become interested in studying tobacco control?
I started as a medical doctor and I saw how tobacco badly affected my patients and how much they struggled to quit smoking. Nicotine addiction is worse than cocaine or any other drug.
Alcohol is a carcinogen and can cause seven cancers. Most people in the U.S. don’t know about this. Along with my collaborators, we used AI to develop educational messages about this risk.
Dr. Taghrid Asfar
This interest led me to lead the first multicenter clinical trial in Syria, my origin country, where we developed and tested a smoking cessation intervention that is implemented in primary health care centers. When we did this trial, there was no tobacco treatment in the country. We didn’t even have a research base, so we created our own. This project was funded by the NIH to support tobacco control in developing countries like Syria.
What are the biggest challenges in intervention efforts today?
We have a wealth of effective treatments for smoking, all supported by rigorous clinical trials. Yet smokers still encounter major obstacles in accessing these vital resources. To overcome this challenge, it is crucial that we focus on advancing digital health and implementation science.
What projects are you working on now?
One of my main projects is to implement and test different strategies for integrating smoking cessation services into the construction sector. We bring in safety managers who are trusted by workers and train them to provide a brief, evidence-based intervention. We want to test implementation. How feasible is it for the safety manager to provide this intervention? And we don’t want only to test it. We’re looking forward to having multiple options for free smoking cessation services available to construction workers.
In the U.S., there has been a dramatic increase in vaping among young people. The tobacco control researcher community is divided into two groups: pro and anti-e-cigarette. Proponents believe vaping helps smokers quit smoking. However, the anti-vaping team is very concerned that a new generation will become addicted to nicotine.
For this problem, I was interested in health communication strategies. With an NIH R01 grant, we developed and tested warning labels targeting young people. We started with a comprehensive review of the health effects of vaping to create our messages, tested them among a panel of experts and then tested them in the target population.
This year, the surgeon general issued a special report about alcohol and links to cancer. Alcohol is a carcinogen and can cause seven cancers. Most people in the U.S. don’t know about this. Along with my collaborators, we used AI to develop educational messages about this risk, and we tested them in an online experiment. We have a manuscript reporting on the results ready for submission soon.
What do you enjoy outside of work?
I have a daughter and a son. My daughter is finishing her Ph.D. this year at Imperial College London and her first manuscript was accepted in Nature, so she will be way better than I am in science. We love traveling and we were lucky to live in different places. Running is important in my life. When I’m working on a new grant or paper, all the good ideas come to me while I run.
Tags: alcohol, cancer research, Department of Public Health Sciences, Dr. Taghrid Asfar, public health sciences, smoking, smoking cessation, Sylverster Comprehensive Cancer Center