Superfund Sites Linked to Aggressive Breast Cancers

Women living close to federally designated Superfund sites are more likely to develop aggressive breast cancers – including the hard-to-treat triple-negative subtype – according to new studies from Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, part of the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.

According to a National Institutes of Health study, some especially aggressive forms of breast cancer that are resistant to treatment are on the rise. Now, three recent studies by Sylvester researchers have uncovered links between breast cancer, Superfund sites and social adversity. A Superfund site is a location that has been contaminated by hazardous waste and identified by the Environmental Protection Agency as needing cleanup as it poses a risk to human health or the environment.

The rise in breast cancer cases – particularly aggressive, hard-to-treat types such as triple-negative breast cancer – highlights the need to examine potential environmental factors contributing to these trends. In Florida, the presence of 52 active Superfund sites has become a focus, prompting members of Sylvester’s Community Advisory Committee to raise awareness and connect with the cancer center about these issues.

“Members of our community raised concerns that where they lived was making people sick,” said Erin Kobetz, Ph.D., M.P.H., an epidemiologist and associate director for community outreach and engagement at Sylvester and Judy H. Schulte Senior Endowed chair in Cancer Research.

“Overwhelmingly,the people who were speaking up about this lived in a neighborhood relatively close to a Superfund site. There’s a growing body of evidence that living in neighborhoods close to these sites is associated with poor health outcomes,” she added.

Although health and Superfund sites have been studied for decades, ties between environmental degradation and pollution and breast cancer remain under-researched, Kobetz said. So, she set up a multidisciplinary team of physicians, basic scientists and epidemiologists to dive in and study breast cancer and proximity to Superfund sites in Florida. Using Sylvester’s SCAN360 data portal, her team was able to retrieve very granular data of South Florida’s neighborhood characteristics and cancer risks.

Proximity to Superfund sites

The first study examined more than 21,000 cases of breast cancer in Florida diagnosed from 2015 to 2019. Kobetz and her co-authors wondered whether proximity to a Superfund site was related to whether breast cancer was metastatic. The researchers found that living in the same census tract as at least one Superfund site raised the likelihood of metastasized breast cancer by about 30%.

The researchers then turned