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Lori
Soni
Award
Winner:
Young
Researcher 2005
Lymphoma
Foundation of America
My
Story
At
the age of eighteen I accomplished a childhood dream: I was granted admission
to medical school. Growing up, I
admired my parents as most children do. My
mother was a cardiologist at a time when there was only one other female
doctor employed by the large Miami hospital where she worked.
I used to watch my mother tie her brightly-colored sari before donning
her white physician’s coat and then heading off to work.
Although medicine is now blessed with an abundance of females, I have
yet to see a doctor wear a coat to work.
As I grew older, my interest in science led me to work in a doctor’s
office, volunteer at a hospital, take AP Chemistry and Biology, and do summer
research with the National Science Foundation’s Young Scholar’s Program.
All of this helped me realize that I wanted to be a doctor, but not
because my mother was a physician. Rather,
I wanted to be a doctor because I loved medicine.
My
goal as an undergraduate at Northwestern was to prepare myself for
Northwestern’s medical school and my life as a doctor.
I knew that medical school would teach me the scientific aspects of
medicine. This meant taking a
broad range of classes in literature, psychology, and philosophy in order to
better understand people so that I could one day provide my patients with the
best care possible. I graduated with an English major. This has helped me to be very discriminating in choosing
words when I speak with patients. It
has also helped me see a patient’s story and not just a medical history.
During my first year of medical school,
a series of lectures on preventive medicine helped me to focus my interests on
the subject. Although I had known
the value of prevention before attending medical school, I had not realized
the extent of a physician’s role in the process.
First, the physician must identify risk factors for a disease.
Second, the physician must understand the patient and his motivations
well enough to get him to avoid those risk factors.
My undergraduate education prepared me for the patient-physician
interaction. Now, I needed to further develop my research skills so that I
could identify high-risk groups in populations. Therefore, I applied for
a summer research position at the Department of Preventive Medicine in
Northwestern Medical School.
Under
the supervision of Dr. Brian Chiu, I evaluated risk factors for non-Hodgkin’s
lymphoma (NHL) in a population-based case-control study of 389 cases and 535
controls conducted in Nebraska between 1999 and 2002 (PI: Dr. Brian Chiu).
We found that, while there was no overall association between sunlight
exposure and risk of NHL, sunlight exposure was significantly inversely
associated with NHL risk among farmers. We
also found that a higher body mass index was associated with an elevated risk of
NHL in both men and women. Through
these two analytic projects I learned how to write computer code to manage data,
gained knowledge in utilizing statistical procedures to analyze data, and
interpreted results appropriately. Currently,
I am writing up our findings in two manuscripts in preparation for publication.
This rewarding experience provided me with a strong foundation for
building a career as a preventive medicine physician.
The
successful completion of these two projects led to an additional collaborative
opportunity with Dr. Chiu in the upcoming year.
With funding from the National Cancer Institute (NCI), (NIH/NCI R03
CA94770, 4/1/02-3/31/04, PI: Brian Chiu), Dr. Chiu and his colleagues
investigated agricultural pesticides use and lifestyle factors with risk of
subtypes of NHL defined by t(14; 18) chromosomal translocation.
They found that risk for t(14;18)-positive NHL is strongly associated
with agricultural pesticide use, whereas risk of t(14;18) negative NHL is
associated with a family history of hematopoietic cancer and cigarette smoking
(women only) (Chiu et al., Proc Am
Assoc Cancer Res 2005; 46:304). Dr.
Chiu has offered me the opportunity to develop an ancillary study to examine the
association of solvents and benzene with risk of t(14; 18)-defined subsets of
NHL. To our knowledge, this has not
been done in previous epidemiologic studies.
The title of our proposal is “Association of Solvents and Risk of
t(14;18)-defined Subsets of Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma.”
I
expect to complete the proposed study by October, 2006.
I will use an existing case-control study as the source of tissue samples
and questionnaire data, and I will use the fluorescence in
situ hybridization (FISH) technique to determine the occurrence of t(14;18).
FISH analysis has been completed in an existing study funded by NIH/NCI
R03 CA94770, 4/1/02-3/31/04, PI: Brian Chiu).
The Young Researcher Award from the Lymphoma Foundation of America (LFA)
will be used to support the assessment of exposure to benzene and solvents using
the questionnaire data. To achieve
this goal I will work closely with Dr. Brian Chiu and Dr. Aaron Blair of the NCI
to develop job-specific modules for jobs and industries that are of particular
interest because of the possibility of exposure to solvents (aromatics,
chlorinated hydrocarbons, and aliphatics) and benzene.
Developing these job modules will take about seven months. During that time I will visit NCI every two months.
Conducting statistical analysis will take another three months, and the
last two months will be spent drafting the manuscript for publication.
The
results of this study could have a significant impact on our understanding of
solvents and benzene associated with lymphomagenesis which ultimately may lead to
the adoption of preventive measures in the future.
Because the study population is well-characterized and cytogenetic data
are available from an existing study, the proposed ancillary study is extremely
cost-effective to address the etiology of NHL, one of the most common
malignancies in this country.
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