Cancer Prevention and Screening: Innovations, Implementation, and Equity
A special issue of Cancers (ISSN 2072-6694). This special issue belongs to the section "Cancer Epidemiology and Prevention".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 October 2026 | Viewed by 11
Special Issue Editors
Interests: cancer health outcomes; cancer prevention and screening; rural health outcomes; medical geography; evidence-based interventions
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
We are looking for studies of innovative interventions—at the patient, clinic, community, and health plan organizational levels—to improve uptake, adherence, and follow-up of recommended cancer preventive measures in real-world settings.
The persistent burden of late-stage diagnoses for preventable cancers demonstrates the importance of developing, adapting, implementing, evaluating, and disseminating innovations focused on cancer prevention and early detection. Despite strong evidence that cancer is preventable via healthy eating, physical activity, vaccination, and screening, many populations experience barriers in awareness and access to cancer prevention. As cancer prevention remains uneven across populations, strategies are needed to improve equity in access and ensure the best outcomes for all. To advance equity and increase transparency, we will accept a few studies where structural barriers overpower the strategy and interventions were found ineffective for certain racial/ethnic groups, geographic areas, clinic types, etc.
In this Special Issue, original research articles are encouraged; reviews may be accepted pending the editors’ approval. Research areas may include (but are not limited to) real-world intervention studies, including adaptation of evidence-based interventions to other populations, and the use of implementation science frameworks to study the following:
- Individual-level interventions, such as health literacy, behavioral economic strategies such as incentives, culturally tailored outreach or navigation.
- Community- or population-level strategies such as partnerships and outreach programs, screening or vaccination clinics.
- Clinic- or provider-level innovations such as EHR-based prompts and clinical decision support, workflow redesign to increase follow-up, provider training to improve equitable preventive care delivery, and strategies to track long-term adherence after the intervention.
- Structural and policy level approaches such as Medicaid expansion or policy changes, regulation changes, workplace policies tied to behavioral prevention, or interventions of transportation, financial or housing support, etc.
- Equity and disparity-focused research such as interventions that worked in one group but not another (e.g., rural vs. urban, race/ethnicity), structural barriers overpowering intended effects (transportation, provider shortages, mistrust), intersection of disability, gender identity, or poverty.
- Null, mixed, or negative findings such as interventions that failed due to system- or context-level obstacles, trials where inequities persisted or were exacerbated, barriers to dissemination, or scaling-up in real-world settings
We look forward to receiving your contributions.
Dr. Jaclyn M. Hall
Dr. Rahma S. Mkuu
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Cancers is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2900 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- cancer
- prevention
- screening
- intervention
- implementation
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