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By Dagny Stuart | Photograph by Dean Dixon
The South is known for many things – hot, steamy summers, iced tea laced with sugar and friendly people with a tendency to welcome strangers. • But beneath the veneer of Southern hospitality and gracious living lurks a silent killer. Cancer is more prevalent in the South, and death rates, especially among African-Americans, are alarmingly high. Cancer researchers have their own name for the Southern region of the United States – The Cancer Belt. • Brain cancer is just one of the malignancies disproportionately affecting people who live in Southern states. Glioma, also known as glioblastoma, may be rare but it is lethal. Ninety-five percent of patients die within two years of diagnosis. • “When you look at a map of brain cancer incidence in the United States, the Southeast just lights up in red,” said Reid Thompson, M.D., associate professor and vice-chair of the Department of Neurological Surgery. “When we found this hot-spot on the National Cancer Institute’s mortality maps, we realized something unusual is going on in this region.”
Thompson and co-investigator Kathleen Egan, M.P.H., Sc.D., have launched a study to find clues that may explain this brain cancer cluster. (Egan, formerly of Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center, is now on faculty at the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Institute in Tampa, Fla.) Vanderbilt-Ingram, along with four other cancer centers in the region, will enroll as many as 1,000 patients in the federally funded initiative.
“We’re asking patients about their diets, possible job-related exposure to cancer-causing chemicals and we’re collecting DNA
samples,” explained Thompson, who also serves as director of Vanderbilt’s Brain Tumor Center. “We know there are some genetic markers that are linked to other forms of cancer and they may play
a role in brain cancer, as well.”
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