ACS launches huge epidemiological study into causes of cancer

Previous efforts have confirmed links between cancer, smoking and obesity. Experts have great hopes for what they may find this time.

By Victoria Stagg Elliott, AMNews staff. May 28, 2007.

The American Cancer Society started recruiting a half-million subjects last month for Cancer Prevention Study-3.

This large, population-based prospective research project will use periodic questionnaires and blood tests to determine the lifestyle, genetic and environmental factors that make this disease more or less likely. It also will investigate how the interaction of these factors comes into play.

The society's first attempt at answering such questions was launched in 1959, when a million men and women were enrolled in a study that lasted until 1972. The results confirmed the association between tobacco use and lung cancer.

Researchers in the second effort, which is ongoing, have followed 1.2 million volunteers since 1982. These findings have shown that obesity increases the risk of several cancers and that aspirin use results in a lower death rate from colon cancer.

"While science can do a lot to explain the biology and genetics of cancer, some of the most valuable information we have is a direct result of the contributions of dedicated individuals over several generations," said Eugenia E. Calle, PhD, principal investigator and the ACS managing director of analytic epidemiology. "We are once again looking to the dedication, compassion and generosity of Americans to come through and help us provide answers that we know will save lives."

Researchers felt that there was a need for this latest project because of changes in lifestyle that mean that possible carcinogenic exposures are different from previous generations. For instance, people take more medications now, and this circumstance is one of many about which researchers will ask. "We need to compare the exposures of the times, and that's very difficult to do when you don't have a new group of younger people," Dr. Calle said.