Scientists have identified a potential driver of aggressive lung cancer tumors in patients who live in areas with high levels of violent crime. Their study found that stress responses differ between those living in neighborhoods with higher and lower levels of violent crime, and between cancerous and healthy tissues in the same individuals. The findings are detailed in the journal Cancer Research Communications.
The study was designed to address the higher incidence of lung cancer in Black men than in white men, said University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign food science and human nutrition professor Zeynep Madak-Erdogan, who led the research with University of Illinois Chicago School of Public Health health policy and administration professor Sage Kim, the principal investigator of the project. This disparity persists even though, on average, Black men smoke less and start smoking later in life than white men, Kim said. In another study, Kim and her team found that Black men living in Chicago zip codes with higher violent crime rates had substantially higher levels of hair cortisol -; one indicator of chronic stress -; than those in areas with less violent crime.
Other studies have linked chronic exposure to stress to poorer outcomes in cancer patients, Madak-Erdogan said. But scientists' understanding of how stress "gets under the skin" to influence lung cancer prognosis is limited. The newer analysis focused on glucocorticoids, a group of steroid hormones like cortisol.
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