Tung-Sung Tseng1, Jin Ye Yeo2
1Behavioral and Community Health Sciences, LSUHSC School of Public Health, New Orleans, LA, USA; 2TCR Editorial Office, AME Publishing Company
Correspondence to: Jin Ye Yeo. TCR Editorial Office, AME Publishing Company. Email: tcr@amepc.org.
This interview can be cited as: Tseng TS, Yeo JY. Meeting the Associate Editor-in-Chief of TCR: Prof. Tung-Sung Tseng. Transl Cancer Res. 2024. Available from: https://tcr.amegroups.org/post/view/meeting-the-associate-editor-in-chief-of-tcr-prof-tung-sung-tseng.
Expert introduction
Prof. Tung-Sung Tseng (Figure 1) is an Associate Professor in Behavioral and Community Health Sciences at the School of Public Health, Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center in New Orleans. Prof. Tseng is a Certified Health Education Specialist (CHES)/Master Certified Health Education Specialist (MCHES) and has chaired the Ethics Committee of the Society for Public Health Education (SOPHE).
Prof. Tseng's research has focused on tobacco, cancer, and obesity-related health disparities. His research interests include tobacco control, childhood obesity, risk behavioral patterns, community-based participatory research (CBPR), health promotion interventions and evaluations, health disparities, and cancer prevention among ethnic minorities and underserved populations. As P.I. or co-investigator on several university- and NIH-funded grants, he has been developing effective intervention approaches and collaborated with researchers to identify mediation and interaction effects between a genotype and a social or behavioral risk factor. He has more than 100 peer-reviewed publications and 150 professional conference presentations.
Dr. Tseng has substantial experience in professional leadership and community service activities. He chaired the Ethics Committee of the Society for Public Health Education (SOPHE) and the Genomic Forum of the American Public Health Association (APHA) and was a co-convener for International Comparisons of Healthy Aging Interest Group, The Gerontological Society of America (GSA). Dr. Tseng also serves as editor, associate editor, reviewer, or member of the review board for thirty more professional journals. He has been recognized with several awards and recognitions, including the Health Education Technology Innovation Award (2024) from the Society for Public Health Education (SOPHE).
Figure 1 Dr. Tung-Sung Tseng
Interview
TCR: What inspired you to pursue a career in behavioral and community health sciences? How has your journey led you to focus on tobacco control, diet quality, and health disparities?
Prof. Tseng: I am interested in human behavior, which is highly associated with health outcomes. Many medical researchers focus on cells and tissues and use animal models to predict human behavior, but ultimately, we want to change human behavior to prevent disease. In social behavioral and public health, we focus on prevention and the changeable risk factors of disease by changing human behavior.
Intervention can be applied to several levels/domains, and one is individual-level behavior change, called behavior modification. Over the past 20-30 years, we have also progressed in looking at multiple levels of intervention strategies, such as interpersonal level change, by targeting friends and family, as well as institutional, community, and policy level change.
I am interested in many aspects of behavioral change for cancer, tobacco control, obesity, and health disparities. Despite knowing the harmful effects of tobacco and its being a risk factor for many cancers, many people still choose to smoke. Hence, I am determined to find out if there is a way to help people quit smoking effectively. Diet and nutrition are also heavily associated with cancers. Many people only focus on diet among the obese, but many cancers are associated with their diet, SSB, and eating patterns. To investigate diet and eating patterns, it is a current challenge to accurately measure what people eat. There is recall bias when we use traditional methods such as the 24-hour recall or FFQ questionnaire. Health disparity it is an important issue not only in the U.S. but also worldwide, and it is associated with many social determinants of health.
TCR: Could you provide a brief overview of your current work in tobacco control? Are there any articles or trends that stood out to you?
Prof. Tseng: I am working on increasing low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) lung cancer screening and smoking cessation. We consider the synergistic effect of smoking cessation and LDCT lung cancer screening. The smoking intervention has to be conducted at the right time, right place, targeted to the right person, to do the right thing using the right way. In our previous study, we only did the right thing, but we did not consider the appropriate time for the intervention, which resulted in limited effectiveness of the intervention. It was shocking to find that smokers refuse to quit smoking despite being diagnosed with cancer due to various reasons, such as wanting to enjoy the last few years of their lives or thinking that quitting smoking only helps with the prevention of lung cancers, and quitting will be futile since they are already diagnosed. However, this is a misconception, as smoking also has an effect on prognosis and the quality of life after treatment. Hence, we utilize timing for LDCT screening as teachable moments to do smoking cessation.
TCR: How do you address health disparities and issues in cancer prevention through your research, particularly among ethnic minorities and underserved populations?
Prof. Tseng: Most studies only identify the difference between groups for health disparity, especially for ethnic minorities and underserved populations. But that is just the first step. As experts in this field, we also want to help find the solutions to these disparities, such as by identifying social determinants of health that contribute to these results. Community-based participatory research (CBPR) is one of the approaches to address these problems and deliver interventions. In the US, we also promote a relatively new concept called implementation and dissemination science, which is relevant in identifying how to deliver interventions appropriately. Currently, studies are being conducted to improve the implementation and dissemination of interventions.
TCR: As the former co-chair of the Ethics Committee of the Society for Public Health Education (SOPHE), what ethical issues do you find most pressing in public health research, and how does SOPHE address these issues?
Prof. Tseng: The most difficult ethical issue is regarding the IRB. Previously, the IRB aimed to protect the scientists and the participants. However, the IRB is becoming increasingly strict, and there is an ethical issue regarding how to get informed consent from participants appropriately. Patient data confidentiality is also an issue. When data is collected and published, we need to provide appropriate measures to protect the confidentiality of patient data, no matter the data type and content. In the past 20 years, social media and smart devices have also resulted in people using these platforms to conduct studies. We provided a code of ethics to provide suggestions for public health and medical researchers to follow-up on how to apply the code of ethics to protect themselves, providers, the community, and the research participants. We also had a workshop and conference to increase awareness for practitioners, researchers, and community members to know about the importance of this ethical issue.
TCR: Your research covers a wide range of topics. Looking back, what achievements or projects are you most proud of, and how have they shaped your perspective on public health research?
Prof. Tseng: I am not sure if I have any that I am most proud of, but there are a few ongoing projects that are interesting to me.
One is on the smoking cessation intervention, where I focus on promoting LDCT lung cancer screening for eligible smokers and identifying the synergistic effect of smoking cessation and cancer screening. We focus on the right topic, the right person, and the right time with the right way to conduct this study. The right topic would be smoking cessation and earlier lung cancer detection; a right person — choosing the African-American population, which is a high-risk population in the US associated with higher smoking rates, higher lung cancer prevalence and higher mortality rates; and right time — I choose the LDCT cancer screening as the right time to deliver the intervention to see if this can increase the smoking cessation rate.
Another project that I am working on is using Augmented Reality (AR) glasses and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to measure the eating behavior of people, such as how fast they eat, whether they are binge eating, and the kinds of food they eat. We are working with computer scientists to apply AI technology. Many people want to use AI, but they do not have the ability to distinguish the accuracy of the results from AI. The current AI model is not very accurate, and we found that the accuracy of current commercial applications using AI to detect the kind of food is less than 50%. Improving its accuracy takes time, and we hope to train our model to detect our application programming interface (API) to use different machine learning models to increase the accuracy of using AR glasses to capture multiple sensors regarding chewing sounds, chewing rate, what kind of food it is, and nutrient intake. We have been working on this for 2 years, but we are awaiting the larger funding to support this project.
TCR: How has your experience been as a long-standing Editorial Board Member of TCR? What are your aspirations for the future of TCR?
Prof. Tseng: I want to thank the journal for the opportunity to serve as the Associate Editor-in-Chief for TCR. When I first joined this journal 10 years ago, TCR published more basic science research, and over time, they started to invite more population scientists like myself to publish their research findings for the journal. To improve the reputation of TCR, I would like to suggest that the journal provide a more supportive and collaborative environment between the editor and the journal to enhance the journal's quality. I also hope TCR can promote a diverse range of fields, such as basic science, clinical science, and population science, as well as new technologies and global collaboration while ensuring the quality of the journal. This can help increase the citation rate of TCR's papers, and TCR's papers can also be recognized more in the cancer research field. I look forward to the continual growth of this journal.