The Investigation of Spatial Correlation between Soil Heavy Metals Content and the Incidence of Oral Cancer
Date Issued
2009
Date
2009
Author(s)
Lin, Shu-De
Abstract
The incidence rate of oral cancer in Taiwan is one of the rapidly growing cancers. For male, the increasing rate of oral cancer incidence is 17.89% between 2001 and 2005, and it is the fastest growing cancer. The purpose of this study was to find out the probably environmental factors of oral cancer by preliminary statistical methods step by step. These results can provide for areas of clinical medicine and epidemiology as a direction in the future. We took the soil heavy metal contents which include As, Cd, Cr, Cu, Hg, Ni, Pb, Zn and the lifestyle factors which include betel quid chewing (BQC) and cigarette smoking (CS) as risk factors for oral cancer. Spearman rank correlation in combination with spatial autocorrelation analysis was used to determine variables which positively correlate with oral cancer and have spatial characteristics. Finally, we compared the differences between these results of ordinary least regression and spatial regression error model. Many studies have been confirmed that BQC and CS habits will lead to oral cancer, but these results of this study revealed that the two lifestyle factors and oral cancer incidence are not significant when taking account of spatial characteristics. These showed that the spatial statistical method or the statistical unit of data types were unable to highlight the characteristics of these two lifestyle factors. For the environmental factors, nickel is the only one heavy metal which significantly correlates to oral cancer. Changhua county is with the most serious nickel contamination, so we infer that is why Changhua with higher incidence of oral cancer than the other towns with similar BQC or CS rates. Residents living in contaminated areas who suffer from a higher risk of oral cancer. And this study reveals that there is the most significant correlation between the soil heavy metal nickel and oral cancer incidence.
Subjects
Heavy metals
Oral cancer
Spatial Autocorrelation
Spatial Regression Model
SDGs
Type
thesis
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