photo: Huffpost
Geomedicine, some say, is the new frontier. And for a lot of doctors the result of research aimed at identifying patterns in pathologies according to geographical distribution is a tool that can't come soon enough.
One of the preliminary studies that has been collecting data on geographical distribution of illness incidence was done to map where two of the most common cancers occur.
The map above shows in red where the higher incidence of breast cancer occurs, and the blue zones show the areas where there is low incidence. Grey areas are counties where there is no reporting or the incidence was too low to register.
In the next map below the graphic shows high (red) and low (blue) incidence of prostate cancer in the lower 48.
Both these graphical maps show a starling fact: that cancers are not random at all. And even more startling is the fact that such different cancers as prostate and breast cancer are also interlinked geographically.
The author of the study suggests that both cancers clusters in some distinct areas, and they run in north-south bands.
If a person then has lived for more than two year in one of the 'hot' zones, that person should consider testing more aggressively than say someone who has not lived there.
And the most worrisome fact was how the highest zones of incidence for one cancer were also the highest zones of incidence of the other overlapped each other. The author suggests therefore that the two cancers are found so tightly connected geographically because they both share an environmental risk factor.
What the researcher also suggests then, is that patients share with their doctors whatever information they have of their geographical location history so that doctors can use it to make decision on care. Geomedicine then has the capacity to become a new platform for medical information sharing.
The third map below, is another example. It shows in combination both breast and prostate cancer but with the added parameter of unemployment rates. The counties in orange and red are the areas where both cancers occur as a relationship to one another and to unemployment.
source: partial Huffpost 4.14.13
Internal Journal of Medicine Geographics
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