Colorectal, lung, and female breast cancers are three of the most commonly diagnosed cancers in the United States. According to the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the highest rates of new cancer cases in 2024 include breast (16%), lung and bronchus (12%), and colon and rectum (8%) cancers.
College of Health faculty member John Hughes, associate professor in the Department of Biostatistics and Health Data Science, has joined a team of researchers who are considering exposure to residing in disadvantaged neighborhoods and how it can impact outcomes for these three cancers. The project, entitled “Assessing Residential Neighborhood Exposome Exposures and the Associations with Cancer Incidence,” received funding from the NCI and brings together Hughes, a biostatistician, with a team of epidemiologists to approach the issue with a fresh perspective.
Researchers will be exploring the neighborhood exposome, the measure of an individual’s exposures over a lifetime and how they relate to health and disease. Specifically, they will be zeroing in on socio-economic deprivation, racial segregation, environmental pollutants, and the built environment. Through this comprehensive study of neighborhood exposures over time, they hope to reveal associations between these sources of disadvantage and certain kinds of cancer outcomes.
According to Hughes, researchers will pull a large dataset from the Virginia and Pennsylvania state cancer registries, as well as birth records and residential histories.
“We are going to look at what is happening with individuals over time, in terms of these exposures and cancer diagnoses, and then we’ll have data that is specific to the exposures,” he said, allowing them to leverage geographic information within the analysis.
“I live in Allentown, and given my situation in Allentown, I may be exposed to certain risk factors for one of these types of cancer,” he said. “If I move to Bethlehem, then my exposure profile certainly would change, mildly or maybe dramatically. A person’s residential history and life history, more generally, can inform us regarding cancer incidence and prevalence.”
Hughes leads the effort to model and analyze the data, joining partners in epidemiology from Virginia Commonwealth, Temple, and Brigham Young Universities. He brings spatial statistics expertise to use geographic information to learn about geographic variation in disease incidence and/or prevalence. He will be applying new statistical methods to create a spatiotemporal model to reveal what is happening with cancer patients over time, in terms of both the exposures and the cancer diagnoses.
Currently, the team is in a data collection phase, in the second year of a 5-year project. In later phases, Hughes will work closely with the epidemiologists to appropriately model and analyze the data.
Hughes’ research aligns with the College of Health’s efforts to utilize innovative technology to advance health equity. “We want to determine the effects of these different neighborhood disadvantage exposure domains,” he said. “We want to find out how they impact these three kinds of cancer, and that may help us tailor interventions that could be effective for the population.”
“That’s our MO in health,” he continued. “Let’s study this problem; through that understanding that we gain, how can we intervene to make a positive impact on the people who are affected by this?”
