Xuehong Zhang
Yale University, CT·Public Health & Epidemiology
Liver cancer is one of the fastest-rising cancers in the United States, and roughly 70% of cases are not caused by the hepatitis B or C viruses. The other causes are poorly understood.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
liver cancer
per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances
forever chemicals
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jun 2027
What they work on
- Measure PFAS levels in pre-diagnosis plasma from six pooled cohorts and estimate how they relate to later liver cancer risk, overall and by race/ethnicity and hepatitis B/C status, in a nested case-control design.
- Test whether specific mixtures of PFAS chemicals act together (synergistically) to raise liver cancer risk more than single compounds, using statistical mixture-analysis methods.
- Explore whether links between PFAS and liver cancer differ across major liver cancer subtypes, and whether plasma PFAS levels relate to survival among patients with liver cancer.
- Estimate the association between Helicobacter pylori infection and the risk of developing liver cancer, overall and separately for viral and non-viral cases, using the Liver Cancer Pooling Project cohorts.
- Quantify how infection with other Helicobacter species, including H. bilis and H. hepaticus, relates to liver cancer risk overall and by hepatitis virus status.
- Compare Helicobacter infection and liver cancer associations in African Americans and whites, testing whether higher infection rates, including CagA- and VacA-positive strains, help explain the racial gap in liver cancer.
More about the research
Liver cancer is also more common among African Americans and Hispanics than among whites, and the reasons for that gap are unclear. Both projects look for new, potentially preventable risk factors. They use large, long-running groups of volunteers (cohorts) who gave blood samples years before any diagnosis, so exposures can be measured before the disease appears. One project examines synthetic 'forever chemicals'; the other examines a family of bacteria.
Why it matters
Finding new causes of liver cancer, especially of cancers not driven by hepatitis viruses, could open new ways to prevent this deadly disease and reduce deaths from it. Because H. pylori infection is very common among African Americans, a confirmed link could guide interventions that narrow racial disparities in liver cancer. Evidence on PFAS and liver cancer could also give regulators, policymakers and public-health practitioners a scientific basis for decisions on these widespread chemicals.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Tongzhang Zheng
Brown University, RI·Public Health & Epidemiology
Test whether pre-diagnosis blood levels of PFAS, especially PFOA, PFOS and PFHxS, predict later renal cell carcinoma, comparing about 650 cases with 1,300 matched controls from five US cohorts.
Anna Pollack
George Mason University, VA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Test whether higher levels of PFASs, POPs and their mixtures in healthy uterine (eutopic endometrial) tissue are associated with new endometriosis diagnoses among 495 women in the ENDO Study operative cohort.
Vaia Lida Chatzi
University of Southern California, CA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Examine associations of PFAS exposure with omics biomarkers and with obesity, type 2 diabetes, and MASLD (fatty liver disease) in more than 50,000 participants from 18 diverse cohorts.
The school
Yale University: 73 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 438 research doctorates a year.
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