Grant Number:	1R34CA293237-01A1 Interpret this number
Primary Investigator:	Heckman, Carolyn
Organization:	Rutgers Biomedical And Health Sciences
Project Title:	A Dyadic Digital Skin Cancer Prevention Intervention for Adolescents and Their Parents
Fiscal Year:	2025

Abstract Melanoma is a top cause of invasive cancer in teens and young adults. Teens have low skin protection rates and also increase exposure to natural and artificial ultraviolet radiation as they progress into adulthood. Sunburns are common, and those experienced as a minor and/or repeatedly are strong risk factors for melanoma. Thus, interventions targeting skin cancer risk reduction amongst teens are needed. Yet, teens tend to be resistant to public health recommendations because, as a group, they perceive that they have more immediate priorities than disease prevention and that the consequences of their current health behaviors are in the distant future. Developmentally, they also tend to be experimenters, risk-takers, and highly influenced by peers. Despite the risks of this vulnerable population, prior sun safety interventions for teens and/or their parents have been few, challenging to disseminate, or minimally successful long-term. With smartphones and internet access virtually ubiquitous among US teens, these modalities offer promising directions for cost-effective dissemination of health promotion interventions that reach teens in their usual environments where relevant behaviors occur. Texting, in particular, has been used successfully for young adult sun safety and widely used with teens in other health domains, but only one trial evaluated a sun safety teen texting intervention (in combination with a 5-hour training by a dermatologist). Although texting was acceptable and feasible, there is still a gap in developing and testing a scalable digital intervention. Further, although teens are transitioning to responsibility for their own sun protection, prior studies have failed to address parents’ ongoing influence (e.g., through communication, modeling, facilitating sun protection). For adults, digital interventions through popular social media (e.g., Facebook) have improved health behaviors such as physical activity. Our work shows promising results delivering a sun protection group Facebook intervention to a national sample of parents of teens. Therefore, we will evaluate entirely digital interventions targeting teens (Multimedia Message Service [MMS] individual smartphone intervention) and their parents (Facebook group intervention) in an innovative dyadic approach (Sun Safe Together [SST]). A diverse national sample of parent and teen (13-17 years) dyads will be recruited cost and time-efficiently using machine learning and digital mining of online data. This R34 Planning Grant’s Specific Aims are to collaborate with teens and parents to: 1) supplement and refine a library of sun safety digital messages and 2) pilot test SST to determine recruitment feasibility; acceptability of and engagement with the interactive teen MMS intervention; data collection feasibility; and retention rates. This R34 will prepare us to conduct an R01 to test the efficacy of the intervention components in a national randomized controlled trial of parent-teen dyads in a 2x2 design (parent only, teen only, parent-teen combined sun intervention, or none). No prior study has disentangled the impact of digital interventions on the teen, parent, or both on sun safety. These highly scalable interventions have significant potential for widespread reach and impact.





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