The international head and neck cancer epidemiology consortium

✍ Scribed by Erich M. Sturgis

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2010
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 42 KB
• Volume: 33
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1043-3074
• DOI: 10.1002/hed.21670

✦ Synopsis

The International Head and Neck Cancer Epidemiology (INHANCE) consortium (http://inhance. iarc.fr) was established in 2004 to study the etiology of squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck (SCCHN) by pooling individual subject data from an international consortium of epidemiologic studies, chiefly of case-control design. INHANCE is coordinated through the International Agency for Research in Cancer, which has extensive expertise in running large international collaborative studies, and also supported through the U.S. National Cancer Institute. Presently, INHANCE includes over 35 studies, which when taken collectively provide questionnaire data on over 25,000 cases and over 35,000 controls, and biological samples from a majority of the study populations. Cases are patients with squamous cell carcinoma of the oral cavity, oropharynx, hypopharynx, and larynx, while controls are for comparison persons without head and neck cancer. The consortium combined questionnaire data into a centralized database with standardization to allow for pooled analyses. This common database includes a range of sociodemographic, behavioral, life-style, and health fields in addition to biomarker data (chiefly human papillomavirus [HPV] and genetic) on a major subset. This section will provide periodic updates of the consortium's efforts and findings, with a brief executive summary followed by the abstract of a published INHANCE article.