Editors' comments, “Epidemiologic studies of nutrition and cancer”

✍ Scribed by H. Bartsch; A.B. Miller

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2005
• Tongue: French
• Weight: 31 KB
• Volume: 116
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0020-7136
• DOI: 10.1002/ijc.21026

✦ Synopsis

In a previous issue we published a mini-review: ''The Role of Nutrition in Cancer Development and Prevention'' by Karin B. Michels . Given the importance of the issues raised by Karin Michels, in this issue we publish a commentary: ''Epidemiologic studies of nutrition and cancer: Let us not throw out the baby with the bath water'' by Rudolf Kaaks and Elio Riboli, and a response by Michels to that commentary.

Michels implies in her mini-review and her response that past research on nutrition and cancer leads one to doubt its importance in cancer causation in the light of bias inseparable from case-control studies and many negative cohort studies. In contrast, Kaaks and Riboli suggest we should not ignore all case-control studybased research, and point out that in several nutrition and cancer areas the findings from both case-control and cohort studies are congruent in showing associations with dietary factors. Confounding seems unlikely to explain most of these associations. They also suggest we should work to improve study design by combining large cohort studies and when available, incorporate biochemical markers of diet and nutrition, suggestions that did not raise objections from Michels in her response. We agree with Kaaks and Riboli that greater increase of international efforts are needed to show which differences in diet explain a significant proportion of variation in cancer incidence.

We also agree that further developments can be anticipated in this important field. One of these could be as anticipated by Muller and Kersten in a recent review article (Nat. Rev. Genet. 2003; 4:315-322) These authors have described some new strategies and potential goals, namely the application of high-throughput