Researchers have found an unexpected link between the level of wealth in residential neighborhoods and the risk of developing pancreatic cancer, finding that residents of wealthier neighborhoods may be more likely to be diagnosed with this malignant disease.
Pancreatic cancer is known as an aggressive disease that develops silently and is often discovered at late stages, making it difficult to treat.
Daylight and its potential link to a reduced risk of pancreatic cancer
Despite advances in treatments, the causes of this disease and mechanisms for its early detection continue to occupy researchers.
Dr. Louise Wang, lead author of the study from Yale School of Medicine, said: "For some cancers, the neighborhood is associated with the likelihood of developing the disease, and we wanted to test that for pancreatic cancer. Are individual factors such as genetics and lifestyle the most important, or do the characteristics of the neighborhood itself play a role?"
The team relied on the Veterans Health Administration's database, which includes a neighborhood-level deprivation index that measures factors such as income, education, and housing quality.
The study included 31,242 veterans diagnosed with the most common form of pancreatic cancer.
The surprising result was that veterans living in the most privileged neighborhoods (higher income, quality of education and housing) had a slightly higher risk of being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, even after excluding the influence of known risk factors such as smoking and alcohol.
Wang explained that a possible explanation is that residents of these neighborhoods may receive more intensive health checks and monitoring, which increases early detection rates and therefore the number of diagnosed cases.
But she stressed that this risk is still small compared to individual risk factors such as smoking.
She also noted that residents of wealthier neighborhoods were older, a factor that may have contributed, at least in part, to the result, although the study controlled for the effect of age.
Wang hopes that future studies will investigate whether the findings apply to health systems other than the Veterans Affairs.
As part of their ongoing efforts to improve early detection, the team plans to explore the role of other factors such as hepatitis C, exposure to pollution, and special military hazards in the development of pancreatic cancer, taking advantage of the Veterans Affairs database's wealth of accurate geographic and health information.
Wang concluded by saying, "The data we have is very rich, especially in terms of geographic information, making it an ideal platform to study risk factors that could enable us to improve prevention, screening, and diagnosis, and achieve better outcomes for patients."
