07-03-2025
UAMS scientist awarded $1.9 million to study air pollution, breast cancer
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (KNWA/KFTA) — A researcher at the Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences received a $1.9 million grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences to study the role of environmental exposures in the development of early onset breast cancer in Arkansas women.
According to a press release, Ping-Ching Hsu, Ph.D., is the first UAMS researcher to receive federal funding for a large, population-based study on environmental exposure and cancer in rural Arkansas communities. Hsu is an associate professor of Environmental Health Sciences in the UAMS Fay W. Boozman College of Public Health and a member of the Cancer Institute's Cancer Prevention and Population Sciences Research Group.
The release says the five-year NIEHS grant will advance Hsu's study of 26,000 Arkansas women, who have been study participants in the UAMS Arkansas Rural Community Health Study since 2007.
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According to the release, ARCH is a large group of women ages 18 to 95 from every county in Arkansas that began as Spit for the Cure.
The release says Hsu has already found that ARCH has high proportions of women younger than 50 who were healthy when they enrolled and later developed breast cancer.
'We already know that among women in the cohort who joined that had breast cancer, 45.6% of them have early-onset breast cancer; among those who were healthy when they joined and now have breast cancer, 20% of them have early-onset breast cancer, which is very high,' said Hsu. 'We have identified 709 mother-daughter pairs in the cohort — about 1,400 women — and we plan to follow them up, especially those who live close to communities that have high environmental exposures.'
Hsu will use data from the EPA National Air Toxins Assessment, U.S. Geological Survey, and the Arkansas Cancer Registry.
The release says the grant will pay for follow-up and outreach to as many as 850 participants among the mother-daughter pairs for additional data with the potential to examine individual levels of heavy metals.
According to the release, Hsu published the results of an initial study of ARCH in the Journal 'Environmental Pollution' and found several significant associations between air pollutants and breast cancer risk.
'We need to raise awareness about the health risks of environmental exposure,' said Hsu. 'Arkansas is feeding everyone in the nation, and we suffer from the exposure.'
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