Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2017

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0174548

Publication Title

PLoS ONE

Volume

12

Issue

3

Pages

1-13

Abstract

Purpose

Cancer results from complex interactions of multiple variables at the biologic, individual, and social levels. Compared to other levels, social effects that occur geospatially in neighborhoods are not as well-studied, and empiric methods to assess these effects are limited. We propose a novel Neighborhood-Wide Association Study(NWAS), analogous to genome-wide association studies(GWAS), that utilizes high-dimensional computing approaches from biology to comprehensively and empirically identify neighborhood factors associated with disease.

Methods

Pennsylvania Cancer Registry data were linked to U.S. Census data. In a successively more stringent multiphase approach, we evaluated the association between neighborhood (n = 14,663 census variables) and prostate cancer aggressiveness(PCA) with n = 6,416 aggressive (Stage≥3/Gleason grade≥7 cases) vs. n = 70,670 non-aggressive (Stage<3/Gleason grade.

Results

We identified 17 new neighborhood variables associated with PCA. These variables represented income, housing, employment, immigration, access to care, and social support. The top hits or most significant variables related to transportation (OR = 1.05;CI = 1.001–1.09) and poverty (OR = 1.07;CI = 1.01–1.12).

Conclusions

This study introduces the application of high-dimensional, computational methods to large-scale, publically-available geospatial data. Although NWAS requires further testing, it is hypothesis-generating and addresses gaps in geospatial analysis related to empiric assessment. Further, NWAS could have broad implications for many diseases and future precision medicine studies focused on multilevel risk factors of disease.

Comments

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability Statement: Data cannot be made publicly available for ethical and legal reasons. This data includes geocoded data at the census tract level linked to individual, anonymized records and releasing PA registry data is against the data use agreement....

Original Publication Citation

Lynch, S. M., Mitra, N., Ross, M., Newcomb, C., Dailey, K., Jackson, T., . . . Rebbeck, T. R. (2017). A neighborhood-wide association study (NWAS): Example of prostate cancer aggressiveness. PLoS ONE, 12(3), 1-13. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0174548

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