Demographer Aims to Investigate Cancer
By Analisa Nazareno
When a demographer marries years of U.S. Census and cancer incidence data, the results can show where the “cancer hot spots” are in a region, which can signal that something unusual has happened in a community. That’s what Corey Sparks, assistant professor of demography at UTSA, found when he analyzed U.S. Census and cancer incident data for 36 South Texas counties, and discovered one particularly hot spot at the former Kelly Air Force Base in San Antonio. “The reason we know that there are elevated incidents of cancer there is because we compared the number of cases we observed with the number we expected to see,” Sparks said. “And what you see in the neighborhoods around the area of the old Kelly Air Force Base is much higher—two to four times the risk of cancer there on average. And when you see places like that with high rates of cancer, persistently high over time, something is going on over there.” The chemical ground water contamination that residents and advocates believe is linked to the high rates of cancer at the former Kelly Air Force Base has been well documented. The Air Force has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to clean up the chemical spills, build water treatment plants, install barriers, and haul away contaminated soil. And while the known cancer risks at the former base are also well documented, Sparks wants to perform the same investigation on incidence of cancer and census tracks throughout the state of Texas to discover other “cancer hot spots.” “There has never been a study done that has been as comprehensive as this for the state as a whole,” Sparks said. Sparks won a UTSA Summer Seed Grant, which he is using to apply for a two-year, $200,000 grant to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). With the NIH grant, Sparks seeks to expand his research to include
the entire state of Texas. He is proposing to analyze the 1.4 million incidents of cancer that occurred throughout the state from the years 1995 to 2010, and compare it to Census data, looking at race, gender, and other potential factors. “[At Kelly Air Force Base] We were able to take information on ground water contamination and link it to the high rates of liver cancer,” Sparks said. “That’s one specific type of cancer and one specific neighborhood. This [NIH] study will expand that principle and look at places with excess cancer rates across the state and across different types of cancer.” Through his investigation, Sparks hopes to discover how cancer types relate to race, gender, and other factors. Sparks said while researchers throughout the nation have conducted similar studies in other states, no such study has been done with Texas data. “Texas has the second-largest population in the nation, and we have tremendous diversity,” Sparks said. “We have a different population than that which exists outside of the state. Other studies don’t include the state of Texas, effectively leaving out a giant segment of the U.S. population from these discussions.” Similar studies discovered high rates of cancer among African Americans in Detroit, leading public policy analysts to discuss cancer’s correlation to air born industrial pollution, as well as the high death rate among African American men with cancer. “This information has an application because people in county health departments are going to be interested in knowing what we have in our back yard, whether we have a level of cancer that is four to five times the level that should exist, and what is causing that,” Sparks said. “What I expect is a lot more questions. The first goal is to identify where these places are and then to focus on specific hot spots and learn as much as we can about these places.”
Corey Sparks, Ph.D.,
Associate Professor, Department of Demography Corey Sparks has become an expert in the areas of demographic estimation, spatial analysis and other quantitative methodologies. He holds a dual Ph.D. in anthropology and demography from The Pennsylvania State University. Sparks participates in a broad range of interdisciplinary research including topics such as health disparities, food insecurity, cancer epidemiology and anthropological demography. He has received funding from several federal funding agencies including the Centers for Disease Control and National Science Foundation.
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