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LaShonda Hall: So I was outasked to speak a little bit about CDC's interest and potential role in this topic. So some of you may remember that back in 2011, the CDC spearheaded the State-of-the-Science Conference on active surveillance in men with localized prostate cancer, with support from NCI and ACS. Some of you in this room were presented to the expert panel inat this conference. The following year, 2012, we published the proceedings along with the final consensus statement. And again, many people in this room either submitted papers or were reviewers, and I thank you all for helping me get the issue out.

So in the intervening 10 years, CDC has supported work that was designed to fill in gaps in the research agenda that the consumerensus panel identified. So we have funded work that aims to better identify who are ideal patients for active surveillance in terms of their tumor characteristics, and psychological characteristics. We try to identify what are reasons that men might reject active surveillance or opt out of surveillance once they were already on a protocol.

We funded work to enhance communication of the presentation of active surveillance to patients as a valid option for the management of their disease. Most recently, we've developed a virtual human simulation decision tool called Talk to Nathan, where patients and their family members can talk... Like a virtual survivor that helps them work through their considerations for screening as well as different treatments options. There's also CME credit available for physicians who use that tool to teach them how to have discussion, treatment decision discussions with patients where they focus more on the man's values.

So the issue of modification of the current nomenclature system was raised by Paul Schellhammer at the 2011 conference, and the consensus panel saw fit to put this in their final statement. Because of the very favorable prognosis of low-risk prostate cancer, modifying the anxiety -provoking term cancer for this condition should be strongly considered. So this was written in 2011, so I'm happy to see that the discussion is still ongoing more rigorously now than it was at that time. And CDC's role will be to continue to do what we can to fund work needed to provide data or other means of support to foster these discussions and to keep the dialogue going.

So the question that I was going to pose at the end is to have people in this room and other people, give some thought to what CDC and public health might be able to do to support a continued dialogue along these lines.