Publications by authors named "Ruth Lunn"

Background: Environmental health research in the US has shown that racial and ethnic minorities and members of low-socioeconomic groups, are disproportionately burdened by harmful environmental exposures, in their homes, workplace, and neighborhood environments that impact their overall health and well-being. Systemic racism is a fundamental cause of these disproportionate exposures and associated health effects. To invigorate and inform current efforts on environmental justice and to raise awareness of environmental racism, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) hosted a workshop where community leaders, academic researchers, and NIEHS staff shared perspectives and discussed ways to inform future work to address health disparities.

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Background: Cancer hazard identification is critical to informing decisions on preventive actions. However, the influence of cancer hazard assessments on the creation of health-protective regulations is poorly understood. Although prior studies have measured the health and economic benefits of regulatory actions in general, we are not aware of efforts to explicitly study the influence of cancer hazard identification on policy decisions in the United States.

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Background And Aim: Epidemiological studies conducted mostly in low- and middle-income countries have found a positive association between household combustion of wood and lung cancer. However, most studies have been retrospective, and few have been conducted in the United States where indoor wood-burning usage patterns differ. We examined the association of exposure to indoor wood smoke from fireplaces and stoves with incident lung cancer in a U.

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The National Toxicology Program strives to raise awareness of cancer hazards in our environment. Identifying cancer hazards is key to primary prevention, informing public health decision making, and decreasing the global cancer burden. In December 2021, the US congressionally mandated 15th Report on Carcinogens was released, adding 8 new substances to the cumulative report.

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This commentary is written in response to a recent commentary in Carcinogenesis that provides several viewpoints on the International Agency for Research on Cancer's (IARC) Monographs program on cancer hazard identification. This commentary offers an alternative viewpoint of the role of cancer hazard identification derived from cancer epidemiology studies in risk characterization, as well as clarification on the previous commentary's interpretation of the purpose of the Monographs and other programs of cancer hazard identification and how IARC communicates the findings of the Monographs.

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Harmonized language is critical for helping researchers to find data, collecting scientific data to facilitate comparison, and performing pooled and meta-analyses. Using standard terms to link data to knowledge systems facilitates knowledge-driven analysis, allows for the use of biomedical knowledge bases for scientific interpretation and hypothesis generation, and increasingly supports artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. Due to the breadth of environmental health sciences (EHS) research and the continuous evolution in scientific methods, the gaps in standard terminologies, vocabularies, ontologies, and related tools hamper the capabilities to address large-scale, complex EHS research questions that require the integration of disparate data and knowledge sources.

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Background: Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are ubiquitous organic compounds associated with chronic disease in epidemiologic studies, though the contribution of PAH exposure on fatal outcomes in the U.S. is largely unknown.

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Background: Over 800 pesticides are registered for use in the United States. Human studies indicate concern that some pesticides currently in use in large quantities may also pose a carcinogenic hazard. Our objective is to identify candidates for future hazard evaluations among pesticides used in high volumes in the United States and also classified as potential carcinogens by U.

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Systematic reviews are powerful tools for drawing causal inference for evidence-based decision-making. Published systematic reviews and meta-analyses of environmental and occupational epidemiology studies have increased dramatically in recent years; however, the quality and utility of published reviews are variable. Most methodologies were adapted from clinical epidemiology and have not been adequately modified to evaluate and integrate evidence from observational epidemiology studies assessing environmental and occupational hazards, especially in evaluating the quality of exposure assessments.

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Background: Due to the large number of chemicals not yet tested for carcinogenicity but to which people are exposed, the limited number of human and animal cancer studies conducted each year, and the frequent need for a timely response, mechanistic data are playing an increasingly important role in carcinogen hazard identification.

Objectives: To provide a targeted approach to identify relevant mechanistic data in our cancer evaluation of haloacetic acids (HAAs), we used several approaches including systematic review, the 10 key characteristics of carcinogens (KCs), and read-across methods. Our objective in this commentary is to discuss the strengths, limitations, and challenges of these approaches in a cancer hazard assessment.

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Background: Red and processed meats have been implicated as risk factors in the development of colorectal cancer in U.S. women, but associations with cooking practices are less well established.

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The Monographs produced by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) apply rigorous procedures for the scientific review and evaluation of carcinogenic hazards by independent experts. The Preamble to the IARC Monographs, which outlines these procedures, was updated in 2019, following recommendations of a 2018 expert advisory group. This article presents the key features of the updated Preamble, a major milestone that will enable IARC to take advantage of recent scientific and procedural advances made during the 12 years since the last Preamble amendments.

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Background: An estimated 110 million workers are exposed to welding fumes worldwide. Welding fumes are classified by the International Agency for Research on Cancer as (group 1), based on of lung cancer from epidemiological studies.

Objective: To conduct a meta-analysis of case-control and cohort studies on welding or exposure to welding fumes and risk of lung cancer, accounting for confounding by exposure to asbestos and tobacco smoking.

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Objective and systematic methods to search, review, and synthesize published studies are a fundamental aspect of carcinogen hazard classification. Systematic review is a historical strength of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) Monographs Program and the United States National Toxicology Program (NTP) Office of the Report on Carcinogens (RoC). Both organizations are tasked with evaluating peer-reviewed, published evidence to determine whether specific substances, exposure scenarios, or mixtures pose a cancer hazard to humans.

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Tumour virus epidemiology.

Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci

October 2017

A viral etiology of cancer was first demonstrated in 1911 by Peyton Rous who injected cell-free filtrate from a chicken sarcoma into healthy chickens and found it induced a tumour. Since the discovery over 50 years ago of the Epstein-Barr virus as the cause of Burkitt lymphoma, seven other human viruses or groups of viruses-hepatitis B virus, hepatitis C virus, human immunodeficiency virus type 1, some human papillomaviruses, human T-cell lymphotropic virus type 1, Kaposi sarcoma-associated herpesvirus and Merkel cell polyomavirus-have been linked to human cancer. Collectively, these eight viruses cause over 20 different types of cancer and contribute to 10-12% of all cancer, with a greater burden in low- and middle-income countries.

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The invention of electric light has facilitated a society in which people work, sleep, eat, and play at all hours of the 24-hour day. Although electric light clearly has benefited humankind, exposures to electric light, especially light at night (LAN), may disrupt sleep and biological processes controlled by endogenous circadian clocks, potentially resulting in adverse health outcomes. Many of the studies evaluating adverse health effects have been conducted among night- and rotating-shift workers, because this scenario gives rise to significant exposure to LAN.

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A critical step in systematic reviews of potential health hazards is the structured evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of the included studies; risk of bias is a term often used to represent this process, specifically with respect to the evaluation of systematic errors that can lead to inaccurate (biased) results (i.e. focusing on internal validity).

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Environmental health hazard assessments are routinely relied upon for public health decision-making. The evidence base used in these assessments is typically developed from a collection of diverse sources of information of varying quality. It is critical that literature-based evaluations consider the credibility of individual studies used to reach conclusions through consistent, transparent and accepted methods.

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Inorganic arsenic is a ubiquitous environmental contaminant that has long been considered a human carcinogen. Recent studies raise further concern about the metalloid as a major, naturally occurring carcinogen in the environment. However, during this same period it has proven difficult to provide experimental evidence of the carcinogenicity of inorganic arsenic in laboratory animals and, until recently, there was considered to be a lack of clear evidence for carcinogenicity of any arsenical in animals.

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Objectives: There are some common occupational agents and exposure circumstances for which evidence of carcinogenicity is substantial but not yet conclusive for humans. Our objectives were to identify research gaps and needs for 20 agents prioritized for review based on evidence of widespread human exposures and potential carcinogenicity in animals or humans.

Data Sources: For each chemical agent (or category of agents), a systematic review was conducted of new data published since the most recent pertinent International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) Monograph meeting on that agent.

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Discovered in the early 1800s, the use of cadmium and various cadmium salts started to become industrially important near the close of the 19th century, rapidly thereafter began to flourish, yet has diminished more recently. Most cadmium used in the United States is a byproduct from the smelting of zinc, lead, or copper ores, and is used to manufacture batteries. Carcinogenic activity of cadmium was discovered first in animals and only subsequently in humans.

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The low survival rate of persons with oropharyngeal cancer (OPC) is directly related to the size of the primary tumor, lymph node involvement and to the smoking history. The association between medical independence and the survival rate of oral cancer is unclear. The purpose of this study was to assess the survival rate of institutionalized patients with oral cancer compared to those living independently.

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Glutathione S-transferases (GSTs) are a family of isoenzymes that play an important role in protecting cells from cytotoxic and carcinogenic agents. GSTpi is encoded by the GSTP1 gene. GSTP1 null mice show an increased risk of skin tumorigenesis induced by carcinogens.

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O(6)-methylguanine-DNA methyltransferase (MGMT) is a repair protein that specifically removes promutagenic alkyl groups from the O(6) position of guanine in DNA. MGMT is transcriptionally silenced by promoter hypermethylation in several human cancers. Methylation-specific PCR (MSP) was used to analyze the MGMT promoter methylation status of 83 hepatocellular carcinomas (HCC) and 2 HCC cell lines (HepG2 and Hep3B).

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