In a large epidemiologic study, researchers at UCLA’s Jonsson Cancer Center found that babies of U.S.-born Latinas are at higher risk for retinoblastoma — a malignant tumor of the retina which typically occurs before the age of 6 — than children of Mexico-born mothers.
The study, which focused on infants born in California, also found that children of older fathers and those born to women with sexually transmitted diseases were at greater risk for the disease, as were children from multiple-birth pregnancies, which may indicate an increased risk from in vitro fertilization. Those findings confirmed the results of several smaller studies.
The research team used data from the California Cancer Registry and examined all retinoblastoma cases reported from 1988 to 2007, said Julia Heck, first author of the study and an assistant researcher at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. Using California data allowed the researchers to cull information from a large and diverse population that included many Latinas.
The study appears in the early online edition of the journal Cancer Causes and Control. READ MORE
Comments