Wan Yang
Columbia University, NY·Public Health & Epidemiology
Colorectal, thyroid and kidney cancers are becoming more common in adults under 50. Analyses of U.S.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Mathematics & Statistics
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
early-onset cancer
colorectal cancer
thyroid cancer
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Identify key environmental and lifestyle risk factors for early-onset colorectal, thyroid and kidney cancer in adults under 50, using mechanistic models combined with data assimilation and national cancer and exposure data.
- Infer whether identified risk factors act by starting cancer (initiation) or by speeding its growth (promotion), and test whether co-exposures amplify each other's effects.
- Quantify how risk factors matter at different life stages to find critical windows of susceptibility, and assess whether combined factors can support a risk calculator for earlier cancer screening.
More about the research
cancer registry data (SEER, the national Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results program) by this team showed 318,781 such cancers in adults aged 25–49 during 2006–2015. Rates rose by 2.4% to 4.8% per year, a pace usually classed as an epidemic. The team's age-period-cohort modeling, which separates effects of age, calendar time and birth year, found that risk climbed with each later birth year across most racial groups. This pattern points to rising environmental or lifestyle causes, which could be prevented if identified. These cancers are still rare in young people, though, and take years to develop. Standard studies would need huge samples, for example over 760,000 people to see 500 early colorectal cancers in five years.
Why it matters
Identifying the causes behind rising colorectal, thyroid and kidney cancer in adults under 50 could support prevention efforts aimed at those causes across the population. A risk calculator built from the identified factors could also help doctors and patients decide when to start cancer screening earlier.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
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The school
Columbia University: 89 labs on PI Pages, $1.4B a year on research, 625 research doctorates a year.
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