By Marty Trieschmann
A researcher at the Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) has received a $1.9 million grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) to study the role of environmental exposures in the development of early onset breast cancer in Arkansas women.
Ping-Ching Hsu, Ph.D., an associate professor of Environmental Health Sciences in the UAMS Fay W. Boozman College of Public Health and a member of the Cancer Institute’s Cancer Prevention and Population Sciences Research Group, is the first UAMS researcher to receive federal funding for a large, population-based study on environmental exposure and cancer in rural Arkansas communities.
The five-year NIEHS grant will advance Hsu’s study of 26,000 Arkansas women, all study participants in the UAMS Arkansas Rural Community Health (ARCH) Study since 2007. ARCH is a large cohort of women ages 18 to 95 from all 75 counties in Arkansas that began as Spit for the Cure. In leading the study, Hsu has already discovered that the cohort has high proportions of women younger than 50 who were healthy when they enrolled and later developed breast cancer.
