UAMS Awarded $1.9M to Study Environmental Links to Breast Cancer in Arkansas

The UAMS campus in Little Rock (Amanda Cordell)

A researcher at the Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute at UAMS has received a $1.9 million grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences to study the role of environmental exposures in the development of early onset breast cancer in Arkansas women.

Ping-Ching Hsu, an associate professor of Environmental Health Sciences in the UAMS Fay W. Boozman College of Public Health and a member of the Cancer Institute’s Cancer Prevention and Population Sciences Research Group, is the first UAMS researcher to receive federal funding for a large, population-based study on environmental exposure and cancer in rural Arkansas communities.

The five-year grant will advance Hsu’s study of 26,000 Arkansas women, all participants in the UAMS Arkansas Rural Community Health (ARCH) Study since 2007.

ARCH is a large cohort of women ages 18-95 from all 75 counties in Arkansas that began as Spit for the Cure. While leading the study, Hsu discovered that the cohort has high proportions of women younger than 50 who were healthy when they enrolled and later developed breast cancer.

“We already know that among women in the cohort who joined that had breast cancer, 45.6% of them have early-onset breast cancer; among those who were healthy when they joined and now have breast cancer, 20% of them have early-onset breast cancer, which is very high,” Hsu said in a press release announcing the grant. “We have identified 709 mother-daughter pairs in the cohort — about 1,400 women — and we plan to follow them up, especially those who live close to communities that have high environmental exposures”.

The release stated that Arkansas’ agricultural background may enhance unique environmental exposures in different communities, leading to high risk an exposure to carcinogens.

In the study, Hsu will use data from the EPA National Air Toxins Assessment, U.S. Geological Survey, the Arkansas Cancer Registry and patient-provided surveys, medical records and specimens to conduct an in-depth study of the association between environmental exposure and immune dysfunction in the cohort’s participants.

The grant will pay for follow-up and outreach to as many as 850 participants for additional bio-specimen and exposure data with the potential to examine individual levels of heavy metals, pesticides and other chemical exposures that could be contributing to their disease.

“We need to raise awareness about the health risks of environmental exposure,” Hsu said in the release. “Arkansas is feeding everyone in the nation, and we suffer from the exposure.”

The release stated that breast cancer is the most diagnosed cancer in women in the U.S. and in Arkansas. According to the American Cancer Society’s latest report, the mortality rate of breast cancer has declined in the last 30 years by 43%, but studies also revealed that breast cancer recorded the highest rate in early onset cases among all early onset cancers.

While genetics and inherited risk factors contribute to about 10% of all cancers, external factors such as environment and lifestyle may be responsible for a much larger portion of cancer risk and explain the increase in cancer among young adults under the age of 50.

One of the nation’s largest rural cancer studies, ARCH is a member of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Cohort Consortium, which includes only 73 high-quality cohorts from 20 countries. The NCI Consortium includes more than 9 million study participants with bio-specimens available on about 2 million. UAMS joins more than 40 NCI research groups in the consortium studying cancer in large populations.

“There’s a lot of basic cancer research going on but none that’s looking hard at environmental exposure and cancer on a large scale here,” Dr. Michael Birrer, director of the Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute, said in the release. “These studies are critical in helping us understand how to prevent the early onset cancers that we’re seeing in our rural communities.”