Author Interviews, Cancer Research, Colon Cancer, Gastrointestinal Disease, HPV / 07.05.2025
DDW25: More Older White and Hispanic Women Developing Anal Cancer
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Ashley Robinson, MD, lead author
Second-year internal medicine resident
Advocate Lutheran General Hospital
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: Briefly, anal cancer makes up around 1% of gastrointestinal cancers and more than 90% of all anal cancers are caused by chronic human papillomavirus or HPV infections.
In previous research, it has been noted that women over the age of 65 have rates that were increasing more than other groups and myself along with my colleagues and the principal investigator of this project, Dr. Eli Ehrenpreis, wanted to further characterize these findings, looking into more specific details of these previously noted trends. Using data from a public database ran by the National Cancer Institute called the Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results program, also known as SEER, and their statistical analysis software, SEER*Stat, we analyzed anal cancer incidence trends, looking at differences between sex, age, and ethnicity in order to further identify specific groups that have more rapidly increasing rates than others.
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