Epidemiology
Epidemiology is the study of how often diseases occur in different groups of people and why; it serves as the quantitative foundation for public health interventions and is a critical science for evidence-based medicine. The focus of the Division of Epidemiology, in the Department of Environmental Medicine, is to gain new understanding of the inter-relationship of genetic and environmental factors impacting on human health. To address these issues, the epidemiologic portfolio includes broad population-based studies, focusing on genetics and other biologic risk factors, and investigations of unique populations, focusing on specific environmental exposures, including air toxicants, heavy metals, benzene, formaldehyde, pesticides, asbestos, cigarette smoke, dietary and hormonal factors, and medications. The studies also seek to identify subsets of persons who are at risk of disease by using biological markers of exposure, biological damage or susceptibility to disease.
Dr Richard B. Hayes leads the Division of Epidemiology, in the Department of Environmental Medicine and is Associate Director for Population Sciences of the NYU Cancer Institute. Dr. Hayes’ research program focuses on genetic and environmental factors related to cancer risk. He studies head and neck, prostate and colon cancer. His recent investigations include study of the oral microbiome and head and neck cancer and studies on air pollution and mortality.
Dr. Anne Zeleniuch-Jacquotte is the PI of the NYU Women’s Health Study (NYUWHS), a prospective cohort of over 14,000 healthy women who donated blood in 1985-91 and have been followed-up since to assess health outcomes such as cancer and cardiovascular disease. The study has been funded by the NCI since its inception and led to over 100 publications. Recent work focuses on whether vitamin D protects against breast cancer. Numerous spin-off studies have used the resources of the NYUWHS, including a NCI-funded study headed by Dr. Arslan and an American Cancer Society-funded study headed by Dr. Chen.
Dr. Yu Chen studies the influence of risk factors related to systemic inflammation on cancer and cardiovascular disease. Dr. Chen is carrying out a multidisciplinary case-control study of the association between periodontal disease and gastric precancerous lesions and is conducting a nested case-control study to investigate the association between the levels of taurine, a nutrient and popular ingredient in energy drinks, and the risk of CHD. Dr. Chen is also a recipient of Outstanding New Environmental Scientist Award (ONES) to study the interactions between arsenic exposure from drinking water in Bangladesh and genetic susceptibility related to inflammation and oxidative stress in cardiovascular disease.
Dr. Jiyoung Ahn has a research interest is in the genetic and microbiomic epidemiology of cancer and cardiovascular disease with a focus on nutrition. Studies that she is currently working on include somatic genome-wide gene expression profiles and prostate cancer survival; human gut and oral microbiome in relation to risk of cancer and cardiovascular disease; dietary factors (i.e., vitamin D, obesity, fat, coffee consumption, and diet pattern), their related genetic pathways, and risk of cancers (colorectal and prostate cancers). She is seeking to expand these multidisciplinary collaborations to enhance research on molecular and genetic profiling in population-based studies.
Dr. Tomas Kirchhoff studies the genetic basis of cancer susceptibility. Ongoing studies aim at identification of the genetic variants conferring an increased risk to common cancers, such as breast, colon, prostate cancers or lymphoma, combinng genome-wide association analysis (GWAS), high-throughput genotyping and next-generation sequencing in large case/control populations. Recent research is integrating information from somatic genetics in tumors to complement the germline findings.
Dr. George Friedman-Jimenez carries out research involving the application of epidemiology to clinical and public health outcomes, and directs the Epidemiology, Biostatistics, and Preventive Medicine course at NYU School of Medicine. He is conducting exploratory studies of exposures to airborne toxicants and health symptoms among workers and clients in NYC nail salons and an epidemiologic study of respiratory outcomes and exposure to airborne toxicants at the World Trade Center, among the 70,000 members of the NYCDOHMH WTC Health Registry. He is also completing an epidemiologic study of Workplace Aggravation of Asthma Symptoms among asthma patients at Bellevue. Dr. Friedman-Jimenez also has a research focus on evidence-based medicine.
Dr Michael Marmor conducts epidemiologic research on pulmonary diseases, ocular disease, injuries and HIV/AIDS. He is currently working with investigators in the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine to study the effects of exposure to World Trade Center dust, gas and fumes on residents and workers who were in the vicinity of the Towers during and after the attacks of September 11, 2001. In a case-control study using the NYU/Bellevue Asthma Registry, he found a negative association between Helicobacter pylori infection and asthma, consistent with the hygiene hypothesis for asthma. He is currently working to develop an epidemiologic study of ocular diseases among the very old in collaboration with colleagues in Ophthalmology and Geriatrics; and another project on road safety in Abu Dhabi, where NYU recently established an undergraduate campus. Dr. Marmor also has long-standing and continuing interests in the epidemiology and immunopathogenesis of HIV/AIDS. He teaches “Introduction to Environmental Epidemiology” in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, which has led to various collaborative projects in the areas of injury epidemiology and ocular diseases.
Dr. George D. Thurston, investigates ambient air pollution and adverse human health effects, considering individual subjects and their responses to ambient pollution, as well as citywide and nationwide population health characteristics and their aggregate associations with air pollution. His studies have also included both healthy and asthmatic children at summer camps in the northeastern United States, as these children are often outdoors and active during summer air-pollution episodes. His studies of aggregate populations consider both human mortality and morbidity. He has found that air pollution produces consistent adverse health consequences across the various populations and locations, for example, on a high-ozone, air-pollution day, New York City hospital admissions for respiratory causes rise approximately 20% above otherwise expected figures. In the aftermath of 9/11, Dr. Thurston’s group monitored the air pollution levels at the NYU Downtown Hospital near Ground Zero until the fires were extinguished, and communicated this information at public forums held in Lower Manhattan. He is Deputy Director of NYU's Particulate Matter (PM) Health Effects Center since 2002, and is a member of the U.S. EPA's Clean Air Science Advisory Committee (CASAC) on nitrogen and sulfur oxide air pollution.
Dr. Kazuhiko Ito is an expert in human health effects and exposure assessment of ambient air pollutants. His current research interests include: (1) the roles of particulate matter (PM) components on human health effects; (2) source-oriented evaluation of PM health effects using the PM2.5 chemical speciation network data; (3) the exposure error associated with ambient air pollution monitoring network and its implication on observed health effects; and (4) identification of sensitive sub-populations to ambient air pollution. Dr. Ito is carrying out projects with the New York City Department of Health on air pollution and out-of-hospital cardiac arrest in collaboration with the New York City Fire Department and Long Island Jewish Medical Center. Dr. Ito conducts a study to model the impacts of weather and air pollution on asthma in New York City in collaboration with NYCDOHMH. Dr. Ito also leads a project to study the role of the chemical components of ambient fine particulate matter on the respiratory and cardiovascular morbidity and mortality in a nationwide database.
Dr. Paolo Toniolo, Professor of Obstetrics/Gynecology and Environmental Medicine, is a cancer epidemiologist with interest in the role of endogenous hormones, nutrition and metabolism in the etiology of cancers of the breast and gynecological organs. He joined NYU School of Medicine in 1984. He helped set up and coordinate the NYU Women's health Study, a large NCI-sponsored prospective cohort study on the role of endogenous hormones in breast cancer etiology, in which he served for many years as Principal Investigator. This study provided, in 1994, the first convincing evidence of a strong association between increasing concentrations of circulating sex steroids and subsequent risk of post-menopausal breast cancer, findings later confirmed by many other similar projects. In recent years, Dr. Toniolo’s research interest has focused on the etiologic role in breast and ovarian cancer of pregnancy and the profound hormonal and physiological changes that it induces. In 2005 he co-founded the International Consortium on Pregnancy and Health as a multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional, international network of investigators to study the complex biological relevance of pregnancy in relation to maternal risk of cancer. The group has obtained several grants that are shedding initial light on this long known but poorly understood association with a great potential for preventive interventions. He has authored over 170 peer-review publications.
Dr. Alan Arslan has a primary appointment in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology. He is actively involved in International Consortium on Pregnancy and Health (ICPH), with research interests on the role of inflammation in female cancer and in the development of novel biomarkers for early detection of cancer. He is developing biomarkers of inflammatory processes in relation to the risk of ovarian cancer in a nested case-control study based on two prospective cohorts at NYU School of Medicine and northern Sweden. He is also involved in several NIH-sponsored pooling projects on rare cancers.
Dr. Mary Perrin, in the Department of Psychiatry studies loss of imprinting at insulin-like growth factor 2 and skewed X-chromosome inactivation in relation to breast cancer and ovarian cancer. She is also studying the parental origin of the predominantly active X-chromosome in families at increased genetic risk of schizophrenia in discordant sister pairs. Dr. Perrin is also studying the role of parental age at birth and psychiatric drugs on methylation of DNA repetitive elements.
