Urban Areas Have Higher Rates of Breast Cancer than Rural Areas

According to a recent study conducted in North Carolina, environmental toxins may be the reason why breast cancer rates are greater in urban regions than in rural ones.

As a Ph.D. candidate at the Duke Cancer Institute in Durham, North Carolina, main author Larisa Gearhart-Serna stated, “Our analyses indicate significant associations between environmental quality and breast cancer incidence.”

The results were based on information from the Environmental Quality Index (EQI) for citizens of North Carolina and were published in Scientific Reports on November 20.

According to a Duke news release, the EQI is “a county-by-county assessment of air, water, land, built environment, as well as the sociodemographic environment,” as stated by study senior author Gayathri Devi, who is also the director of the Duke Consortium for Inflammatory Breast Cancer at the institute and a professor of surgery and pathology.

Devi and Gearhart-Serna examined data from the EQI with state-level statistics on the incidence of breast cancer cases and the disease’s stage at diagnosis in North Carolina.

With 10 million residents distributed over 100 rural and urban counties, the state provides a suitable model for differences in breast cancer risk, according to the study.

There are certain counties with greater “environmental quality” than others. The Duke team discovered that, in comparison to counties with superior environmental quality, residents of impoverished counties had around 11 more instances of breast cancer per 100,000 people.

They pointed out that this was particularly true in cases of early (localized) breast cancer.

The high rate of breast cancer cases was particularly severe in urban areas with low environmental quality. According to the researchers, land pollutants like pesticides and hazardous chemicals from industry or agriculture appeared to have an impact on cancer rates in various areas, both urban and rural.

Black women in North Carolina seemed particularly at risk. The study discovered that counties with large proportions of black female inhabitants also had higher rates of late-stage breast cancer diagnosis. Lower screening mammography rates might be a contributing factor of that discrepancy, the study said.

The results are essential for “identifying a critical need to assess cumulative environmental exposures in the context of cancer stage. This has the potential to develop measures to reduce disease incidence in vulnerable communities,” according to Gearhart-Serna in the news release.