Cancer Epidemiology
Investigating environmental, lifestyle, and genetic factors that lead to increased incidence, morbidity and mortality from cancer, and integrate biomarkers into these studies.
Leader: Regina Santella, PhD
Co-Leader: Mary Beth Terry, PhD
The Cancer Epidemiology Program explores how external factors affect cancer risk, and how a person's genes can modify that affect. Risk factors do not inevitably lead to cancer, but increase the chances that any one person will later get it. Quantifying this probabilistic relationship requires large groups of people or tissue samples. Investigators in the Cancer Epidemiology Program work with several large study populations, including those of The Metropolitan New York Breast Cancer Registry, The Long Island Breast Cancer Project, and the Columbia Children's Center for Environmental Health. They also study populations from Taiwan, Israel, and the region of the Chernobyl nuclear accident.
Researchers often use biomarkers to quantify prior exposure to carcinogens more precisely than less direct measures. To explore genetic factors, they look at variations between individuals of genes that are involved in promoting or impeding cancer. By statistically analyzing cancer rates among large groups of people with well known exposure levels, often with genetic information, the investigators can quantify the effect of both exposures and genetic factors on cancer rates.
Major Themes
The program members come from two clinical departments and three public health departments. Their work revolves around the themes of:
- Molecular epidemiology — integrating data from biological specimens with epidemiological data to understand cancer risk
- Timing of events — exploring the importance of key times in life, for example before and just after birth, to see how exposure in these periods alters cancer susceptibility
- Global cancer epidemiology — exploring cancer through large, longitudinal studies around the world