By Diana Barr, St. Louis Business Journal, June 15, 2007

A medical Web site that draws tens of thousands of visitors each month is moving its operations to the Siteman Cancer Center at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and the Washington University School of Medicine.

As director of the Harvard Center for Cancer Prevention in Boston, epidemiologist Dr. Graham Colditz led the development of a Web site to provide visitors with customized risk assessments for five of the most common chronic diseases in the United States and offer personalized tips for prevention. Now in St. Louis, Colditz has brought the Web site with him. The redesigned page, www.YourDiseaseRisk.wustl.edu, will be up and running June 22.

In November, Colditz was named associate director of prevention and control for the Siteman Cancer Center as well as the Niess-Gain Professor of Medicine at Washington U.

Harvard gave Colditz the OK to bring the Web site to the Siteman Cancer Center, a task that involved not only computer conversion but also some changes in layout to fit Siteman''s Web site. An Idaho-based health communications consultant involved in updating the site will continue in that role as a consultant to the Siteman Cancer Center.

The Web site was originally developed around cancer, but it now also offers risk assessments for diabetes, heart disease, osteoporosis and stroke.

To produce the Web site''s assessment tools, a team of scientists gathered the causes and strategies for prevention, which Colditz said were then made "fun, friendly and engaging" for visitors'' use. Colditz said the list of contributors to the Web site will be expanded, as will the number of diseases that are assessed on the site.

In the area of disease prevention and control, Colditz said, there''s a clear responsibility to bring state-of-the-art prevention messages to the community.

"We just completed an update of strategies for prevention for leading causes of cancer," he said. "And a major effort is for Siteman to build that into a community outreach effort, development work to bring it into the primary care setting and ways to bring prevention to the community."

Colditz is in the process of recruiting five to seven additional faculty members.

To visit Your Disease Risk, go to www.YourDiseaseRisk.wustl.edu.