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Dietary Inflammation Index, developed at Arnold School, could yield important information to reduce cancers

April 12, 2013

Dr. Susan Steck, a researcher in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Arnold School of Public Health, has received a grant from the Prevent Cancer Foundation to study the impact of a dietary inflammatory index on reducing the risks of breast and colorectal cancers.

The two-year award of $80,000 enhances Steck’s research program on the link between chronic inflammation and chronic diseases, including cancers.

“This is particularly apparent for colorectal cancer (CRCA) where use of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), such as aspirin, has been found to reduce risk,” said Steck, who also has an appointment within the Cancer Prevention and Control Program at the Arnold School. “Unfortunately, side effects from NSAIDs prohibit their widespread use in preventing cancer. Diet, on the other hand, offers a safer and perhaps even more effective way to reduce inflammation, and consequently, cancer risk.”

Studies have shown that inflammation is an important process in the growth of many types of cancers. Dietary factors have anti- and pro-inflammatory properties, and understanding the factors that inhibit or reduce inflammation could be beneficial in cancer prevention and treatment.

“No nutrient, however, is consumed alone but in conjunction with other nutrients and non-nutrient components of food. We developed and validated a dietary inflammatory index (DII) to assess the overall quality of diet with regard to its inflammation potential,” she said.

Steck and Fred Tabung, an epidemiology graduate student at the Arnold School, recently applied the DII to the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) Food Frequency Questionnaire (FFQ) data. They found that the DII was significantly associated with three markers of systemic inflammation.

“We inferred from the findings that the FFQ-derived DII is likely to detect significant associations between the inflammatory potential of overall diet and breast and colorectal cancers, two cancers of emphasis in the Prevent Cancer Foundation call for proposals,” said Steck.

“We now propose to utilize data from the WHI observational study and clinical trial to evaluate the impact of this novel DII on postmenopausal breast cancer and colorectal cancer,” she said. “The study will have a large public health impact by strengthening the evidence for a new tool assessing the overall quality of the diet and providing support for its use in other studies of diet and cancer, as well as its future use in intervention studies.”

 

      

 

Arnold School student receives prestigious travel award

April 12, 2013

Fred Tabung, an epidemiology student pursuing a doctorate at the Arnold School, is the recipient of a prestigious travel award from the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) and the American Society for Nutrition (ASN).

The FASEB Maximizing Access to Research Careers (MARC) Program Travel Award pays his expenses to the 2013 Experimental Biology meeting in Boston later this month.

Tabung will present a poster and was selected as one of six finalists to participate in the ASN Young Minority Investigator Oral Competition. The MARC Program Travel Award is a component of a federal grant from the National Institute of General Medicine Sciences.

“Fred is an outstanding doctoral student who graduated with a master’s degree in public health from USC in 2009,” said researcher Dr. Susan Steck of the Cancer Prevention and Control Program and Tabung’s faculty mentor. “He returned to Cameroon for two years, and has really hit the ground running since joining the doctoral program in epidemiology at the Arnold School 2011.”

A native of Cameroon in West Africa, Tabung is a student in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, where his chief interest is in the identification of modifiable risk factors for cancer.

Prior to beginning his graduate education in 2007, Tabung worked at a Cameroon hospital where he assisted in diagnosing cancers. He also worked part time at a cancer registry to centralize data on various cancers.

“In my close to six years of work experience in these two institutions, most of the cancers we diagnosed or documented were advanced stage cancers with consequent poor prognosis,” he said. “This initiated my interest in public health approaches to cancer prevention and control within the context of a graduate program.”

Tabung earned a bachelor’s degree in medical laboratory sciences from the University of Buea in Buea, Cameroon, in 2001. He was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to support his master’s degree education.

His poster and oral presentation at the ASN meeting will feature the results of a recent study, titled “Validation of the Dietary Inflammatory Index in the Women’s Health Initiative.” (See related story this page.)

Findings of the study suggest that a new dietary inflammatory index “represents a new tool for assessing the association between diet and chronic diseases such as cancer,” he said.

In addition to the FASEB MARC travel award, Tabung had an abstract accepted for oral presentation at the 2013 South Carolina Public Health Association meeting, and was selected for a travel award for the American Institute for Cancer Research Annual Meeting in 2012.

“The results of his master’s thesis were published last year, and Fred has been extremely productive in submitting grant proposals, one of which was recently funded by the Prevent Cancer Foundation to support his dissertation research,” said Steck.

“Fred is a highly dedicated and self-disciplined student with a very strong work ethic. In addition to proving himself as a very valuable team member on various research projects, Fred has been a delight to have in the classroom, and is well-respected by faculty and his peers,” she said. “He clearly has a bright future in the field of cancer prevention and control.