The American Cancer Society is inviting participants to join its ongoing Cancer Prevention Study 3 (CPS-3) to use a new app to help investigators track the COVID-19 epidemic and inform future research efforts.
The app, the COVID Symptom Tracker, was created by doctors and scientists at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Massachusetts General Hospital, King’s College London, and Stanford University School of Medicine, working in partnership with the health science company ZOE. It is available to anyone in the United States or United Kingdom.
Participants of the study are asked to download the app and track whether they feel any symptoms each day.
The goal of the app is to:
Better understand symptoms of COVID-19,
Evaluate how fast the virus is spreading in different areas,
Identify high-risk areas in the country,
Identify who is most at risk by better understanding symptoms linked to health conditions; and
Identify the exposure of healthcare workers to COVID-19.
“By inviting CPS-3 participants to use this app, we hope to be able to help address the immediate and long-term needs of cancer patients and survivors,” Alpa Patel, senior scientific director, epidemiology research and lead investigator for CPS-3, said in a statement. “In the short term, data gathered from the app will help characterize the progression of symptoms and trajectories related to coronavirus. Over time, the data can be combined with CPS-3 data to study the longer-term health effects related to infection, including in vulnerable populations like cancer survivors.”
The Cancer Prevention Study includes more than 300,000 participants from 35 states and Puerto Rico who completed a comprehensive baseline survey that included extensive medical, lifestyle, and other information. Participants are contributing to a better understanding of the roles of lifestyle, genetic, and other factors in cancer.
COVID-19 Tracker can be used with other major studies, including the Nurses’ Health Study, one of the largest and longest-running scientific studies in the world with 280,000 participants, many of whom are active health care workers treating people with COVID.
