California researchers are leading a nationwide effort to understand why some Asian American communities experience high rates of certain cancers, particularly lung cancer among women who have never smoked and early-onset breast cancer. According to researchers at UC San Francisco, “Asian Americans are actually the first racial and ethnic group for whom cancer is the leading cause of death.”
The ASPIRE Cohort, a $12.5 million National Cancer Institute-funded study, represents the first large-scale longitudinal cancer study focused on Asian Americans. Led by researchers from UC San Francisco, UC Irvine, UC Davis, Cedars-Sinai, and Temple University, the study will follow 20,000 Asian Americans over time. One significant finding driving the research is that lung cancer incidence has declined across much of the United States as smoking rates have fallen, yet researchers have observed a slight increase among Asian Americans despite relatively low smoking rates. More than half of Asian American women diagnosed with lung cancer are nonsmokers.
Early-onset breast cancer—diagnosed before age 50—is “going up the fastest among Asian Americans,” according to UC San Francisco cancer epidemiologist Scarlett Gomez. Recent data show rates among Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders are approaching those of non-Hispanic white women, though experts do not yet understand why.
A central goal of the ASPIRE study is to move beyond treating Asian Americans as a single category. The term encompasses people with roots in dozens of countries from Sri Lanka to China’s border with Russia to Pacific islands, each with different exposure patterns and cuisines. When researchers separate and examine distinct Asian ethnicities, they see significant variation: Filipino women have higher incidence of thyroid cancer, while stomach cancer has been more common among some Korean and Japanese people. Combining all Asian Americans into one category, as has been common in previous research, makes these critical differences impossible to detect.
The study also addresses longstanding gaps in research representation. Although Asian Americans make up nearly 8% of the U.S. population, they have historically received little research funding, and existing cancer studies have often included too few Asian Americans to draw meaningful conclusions about specific ethnic groups.
This article is an AI-assisted summary. All facts and figures are drawn from the original report: https://newspub.live/science/one-label-many-risks-how-grouping-asian-americans-hides-deadly-cancer-patterns/