Researchers Examine How Environmental Contaminants Affect Diverse Populations

An NC State epidemiologist is leading a wide-ranging study to learn how environmental contaminants affect liver health in diverse populations. Cathrine Hoyo, a Goodnight Innovation Distinguished Chair, first began examining these connections to test a suspicion: When she worked at Duke University, she found a high level of cadmium in pregnant women who lived in a neighborhood of northeast central Durham. When she looked at National Cancer Institute data, she found that those North Carolina ZIP codes with the highest incidents of liver disease overlapped with those with the highest levels of cadmium. Those rates have been increasing since 1995, when the state’s cancer registry was started. Article