Environmental Epidemiology and Cancer Webinar Series

There is great interest in childhood cancer prevention, including understanding how environmental exposures affect the childhood cancer continuum. Dr. Michael Scheurer is studying genetic and social determinants of adverse outcomes experienced by Latino pediatric cancer survivors, as well as biological and social factors that contribute to leukemias among African American children. In this webinar, he presented on epidemiologic evidence for the roles of environmental exposures in pediatric cancers.

The 3-Generation Child Health and Development Studies has explored the relation of perinatal events and environmental chemical exposures to cancer in mothers, sons and daughters and recently to cancer risk factors in granddaughters. These are some of the first studies ever to report on the relation of in utero exposures to cancer risk and to consider the importance of exposure timing during windows of susceptibility. Dr. Cohn will summarize published studies on breast cancer, testes cancer, and new findings on early onset colon cancer and our newest funding and approach for investigation of two-generation risk for lethal prostate cancer with a focus on disparate higher risk for aggressive disease in Black men. She also presented metabolomics findings relevant to uncovering mechanisms observed for patterns of cancer risk in the Child Health and Development Studies cohort and discuss her view of next steps for life-course studies of cancer.

This webinar discussed the rapidly advancing field of exposomics, particularly in the context of precision medicine, as well as the research needs in the areas of exposure assessment, longitudinal studies, and statistical methods addressing mixtures and multidimensional exposures.