Current Research Interests
Dr. Olson's interests are in environmental and genetic risk factors for cancer, particularly endometrial and pancreatic cancers and glioma. Dr. Olson is a founder and leader of the Epidemiology of Endometrial Cancer Consortium (E2C2). This NCI-supported consortium includes investigators from the US and other countries who are interested in combining resources in order to study this underfunded disease. Dr. Olson's recently completed population-based case-control study of endometrial cancer is a contributor to E2C2 analyses. Among the several ongoing analyses in E2C2, Dr. Olson and colleagues are pooling data from several studies to determine risk factors in African American women. Incidence in this minority group is lower than for white women, but mortality is considerably worse. She is studying the reasons for this disparity, including an analysis of SEER-Medicare data to determine the influence of diabetes and other medical conditions on outcomes. The pancreatic cancer epidemiology study is part of the Familial Pancreatic Cancer Registry study led by Dr. Robert Kurtz of the Gastroenterology Service which includes surveillance of unaffected relatives of pancreatic cancer cases. We are pursuing the hypotheses that allergies are associated with both risk and outcomes, including a pooled analysis of allergies and risk in several studies in the Pancreatic Cancer Case-Control Consortium (PANC4) a newly-funded prospective study of IgE, a marker of allergies and risk, and a pilot study of IgE and survival. Other activities within PANC4 include pathway analyses of data from the recent genome wide association studies focused on genes involved in allergies.
Publications by Sara Olson
