This is part of an occasional series that recalls some of the stories reported 10 years ago in the News section of the Journal.
In 1994, the National Cancer Institute began the research phase of the Long Island Breast Cancer Study Project (LIBCSP), which had been mandated by Congress the year before. Ten years and $30 million later, there is no proven association between environmental factors and increased breast cancer incidence on Long Island, but the project has yielded some interesting results and revealed the need for better methods to study cancer clusters.
Of the 10 individual projects funded by the National Cancer Institute, the largest was the case-control study headed by Marilie Gammon, Ph.D., a professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the University of North Carolina School of Public Health. Limited by the law in what they could study, Gammon's group focused on the risks associated with exposure to organochlorines and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). A companion study looked at exposures to electromagnetic fields.
Long Island residents who had hoped that these studies would explain their breast cancers were disappointed when no links between exposures to any of the studied environmental factors and increased breast cancer risk were found. Some scientists insisted that investigators should have used a cohort study design instead of the mandated case-control study. "You... gain different types of information from different types of studies," replied Gammon. "We were able to find a piece of the puzzle instead of a definitive answer."
One such piece of the puzzlealbeit unrelated to the mandated environmental exposure studieswas published in May in the Journal of the American Medical Association. An analysis of the data collected in the study's questionnaire found that the use of aspirin and other nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs was associated with a decreased risk of breast cancer.
Gammon's group is now working on a follow-up study to see if breast cancer mortality is associated with any environmental factors and another study that is searching for genetic polymorphisms that may make a woman more susceptible to environmental risk factors for breast cancer.
The LIBCSP also "opened up the need for more global ways of addressing cancer clusters," said Deborah Winn, Ph.D., chief of the clinical and genetic epidemiology research branch at NCI. "It's clear you can't just go after cluster after cluster," and that new methods are needed.
NCI has teamed up with the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences to fund several breast cancer and the environment research centers that will look at how environmental factors affect puberty, which can influence breast cancer risk. For part of these projects, researchers will study young girls of different ethnic groups and examine their exposures to a variety of environmental, nutritional, and social factors as they mature through puberty. "It's a way of approaching the problem that's different from case-control studies," said Winn.
![]() |
||||
|
Oxford University Press Privacy Policy and Legal Statement |