Issues

The cover image is adapted from Figure 4 in the article “Integrating Electronic Health Record, Cancer Registry, and Geospatial Data to Study Lung Cancer in Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Ethnic Groups,” by DeRouen and colleagues. The figure shows the approach to categorization of detailed race/ethnicity and multi-racial/ethnic groups. A relatively high proportion of Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) females with lung cancer have never smoked. The study of lung cancer among AANHPI females who have never smoked has been hindered by the lack of a sufficiently large and representative data source to document population-level incidence rates of lung cancer stratified by sex, detailed race/ethnicity, and smoking status. Integrative data analysis, which combines data from multiple sources to enrich the number of observations or data on explanatory variables, takes advantage of existing resources (e.g., health care data) to examine rare diseases among “small populations” of interest, like AANHPI ethnic groups. The authors assembled a large-scale, multilevel electronic health record (EHR)-based cohort to facilitate research on the incidence and etiology of lung cancer among specific AANHPI ethnic groups. The cohort comprises males and females of any race/ethnicity but is designed specifically to quantify the burden of lung cancer among detailed single- and multi-racial/ethnic AANHPI groups. This diverse, multilevel dataset will allow for much-needed research on lung cancer risk, especially among AANHPI female never-smokers, and serve as a critical evidence base to inform screening, research, and public health priorities in this growing population. For more information, see the article beginning on page 1506.