Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Visualizing The Diffusion Of Digital Mammography In New York State, Francis P. Boscoe, Xiuling Zhang

Epidemiology & Biostatistics Faculty Scholarship

Digital mammography saw rapid adoption during the first decade of the 2000s. According to data maintained by the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates mammography machines, fewer than 1 percent of the machines in 2001 were digital. By 2014, this figure had risen to 94%. We were interested in identifying the times and locations where the technology was introduced within the state of New York as a way of illustrating the uneven introduction of this technology. While the diffusion of medical innovation has been well-studied, there have not been many instances where maps or geographic information science methods have been …

Testing Modeling Assumptions In The West Africa Ebola Outbreak, Matthew C. Ingram, Keith Burghardt, Christopher Verzijl, Junming Huang, Binyang Song, Marie-Pierre Hasne

Political Science Faculty Scholarship

The Ebola virus in West Africa has infected almost 30,000 and killed over 11,000 people. Recent models of Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) have often made assumptions about how the disease spreads, such as uniform transmissibility and homogeneous mixing within a population. In this paper, we test whether these assumptions are necessarily correct, and offer simple solutions that may improve disease model accuracy. First, we use data and models of West African migration to show that EVD does not homogeneously mix, but spreads in a predictable manner. Next, we estimate the initial growth rate of EVD within country administrative divisions and …

The Relationship Between Cancer Incidence, Stage, And Poverty In The United States, Francis P. Boscoe, Kevin A. Henry, Recinda L. Sherman, Christopher J. Johnson

Epidemiology & Biostatistics Faculty Scholarship

We extend a prior analysis on the relation between poverty and cancer incidence in a sample of 2.90 million cancers diagnosed in 16 U.S. states plus Los Angeles over the 2005-2009 period by additionally considering stage at diagnosis. Recognizing that higher relative disparities are often found among less-common cancer sites, our analysis incorporated both relative and absolute measures of disparities. Fourteen of the 21 cancer sites analyzed were found to have significant variation by stage; in each instance, diagnosis at distant stage was more likely among residents of high-poverty areas. If the incidence rates found in the lowest-poverty areas for …

Public Domain Small-Area Cancer Incidence Data For New York State, 2005-2009, Francis P. Boscoe, Thomas O. Talbot, Martin Kulldorff

Epidemiology & Biostatistics Faculty Scholarship

There has long been a demand for cancer incidence data at a fine geographic resolution for use in etiologic hypothesis generation and testing, methodological evaluation, and teaching. In this paper we describe a public domain data set containing data for 23 anatomic sites of cancer diagnosed in New York State between 2005 and 2009 at the level of the census block group. The data set includes 524,503 tumors distributed across 13,823 block groups with an average population of about 1,400. In addition, the data have been linked with race and ethnicity and with socioeconomic indicators such as income, educational attainment, …

The Relationship Between Area Poverty Rate And Site-Specific Cancer Incidence In The United States, Francis P. Boscoe, Christopher J. Johnson, Recinda L. Sherman, David G. Stinchcomb, Ge Lin, Kevin A. Henry

Epidemiology & Biostatistics Faculty Scholarship

BACKGROUND

The relationship between socioeconomic status and cancer incidence in the United States has not traditionally been a focus of population-based cancer surveillance systems.

METHODS

Nearly 3 million tumors diagnosed between 2005 and 2009 from 16 states plus Los Angeles were assigned into 1 of 4 groupings based on the poverty rate of the residential census tract at time of diagnosis. The sex-specific risk ratio of the highest-to-lowest poverty category was measured using Poisson regression, adjusting for age and race, for 39 cancer sites.

RESULTS

For all sites combined, there was a negligible association between cancer incidence and poverty; however, …

Occupational Exposure To Ultraviolet Radiation And Risk Of Non-Melanoma Skin Cancer In A Multinational European Study, Simona Surdu, Edward F. Fitzgerald, Michael S. Bloom, Francis P. Boscoe, David Orlo Carpenter, Richard F. Haase, Eugen S. Gurzau, Peter Rudnai, Kvetoslava Koppova, Joelle Fevotte, Giovanni Leonardi, Marie Vahter, Walter Goessler, Rajiv Kumar, Tony Fletcher

Epidemiology & Biostatistics Faculty Scholarship

Background: Studies suggest that ambient sunlight plays an important role in the pathogenesis of non-melanoma skin cancers (NMSC). However, there is ongoing controversy regarding the relevance of occupational exposure to natural and artificial ultraviolet radiation (UV) radiation.

Objectives: We investigated potential associations between natural and artificial UV radiation exposure at work with NMSC in a case-control study conducted in Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia. Methods: Occupational exposures were classified by expert assessment for 527 controls and 618 NMSC cases (515 basal cell carcinoma, BCC). Covariate information was collected via interview and multiple logistic regression models were used to assess associations between …