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Bio
Arthur Schatzkin, who was Chief of the Nutritional
Epidemiology Branch at the US National Cancer Institute
(NCI) since 1999, dedicated his career to devising methods
to improve the accuracy of nutrition studies and to designing
experimental studies about the eff ect of changing diet on
the onset and prevention of cancer. “His legacy was that he
recognised we have to experiment to see if intervention makes
any diff erence. We can’t rely strictly on purely observational,
non-experimental studies”, says James Marshall, a professor
in cancer prevention and population science at the Roswell
Park Cancer Institute in Buff alo, NY.
Early in his career, Schatzkin described an association
between moderate alcohol intake and risk of breast cancer
from data collected in the fi rst National Health and Nutrition
Examination Survey. In later experimental studies, he asked
women to consume the equivalent of two alcoholic drinks
per day and found increased oestrogen concentrations in
plasma and urine with alcohol consumption, suggesting
a link between alcohol and breast cancer. These studies
illustrated “Arthur’s ability to move back and forth between
experiment and observation as needed and as appropriate”,
says collaborator and NCI researcher Philip Taylor.
In the Polyp Prevention Trial, Schatzkin and his
colleagues, including Marshall, tested the hypothesis from
earlier observational studies that suggested a high-fi bre
diet lowers the risk of colorectal cancer. But they found
that the high-fi bre, low-fat diet didn’t reduce the risk of
polyps recurring and reported these fi ndings in The New
England Journal of Medicine in 2000. Schatzkin continued
to investigate whether fi bre can protect against colorectal
cancer and in a study of more than 450 000 people, he
found that total fi bre intake didn’t reduce the risk of cancer
but there was a reduced risk associated with consuming
wholegrains. “He was extremely open to the idea that we
might not have the whole picture”, says Marshall. “He was
a consummate scientist.”
Schatzkin addressed the limited range of reported dietary
intake in studies by conceiving and organising a cohort of
more than 560 000 men and women in partnership with
AARP. In the NCI-AARP Diet and Health Study, Schatzkin
and his colleagues combined information about diet,
exercise, family health, and medication use gathered from
questionnaires with follow-up reports of mortality and
cancer incidence to study the relation between cancer
and nutrition. It was the largest study of its kind at the
time, according to Rashmi Sinha, the Deputy Chief of the
Nutritional Epidemiology Branch. The large cohort allowed
Schatzkin to study the range of diets in the population and
also to investigate rare cancers. Schatzkin’s original interest
in establishing the study was to look at the relation between
fat intake and breast cancer, which he did by selecting data
from the extremes of fat intake as well as some in between.
“It was a very driven, focused approach but exactly to the
point of one of the biggest questions of the day, which
unfortunately is still open today”, says Taylor. Schatzkin also
studied whether genetic polymorphisms could be used as
biomarkers of exposure. “To him, it was important to have
the best measures possible”, says Sinha.
Schatzkin graduated from Yale University in 1969 and
earned his medical degree from the State University of New
York Downstate College of Medicine 7 years later. He later
earned master’s and doctorate degrees in public health from
Columbia University. He was an assistant professor of public
health and medicine at Boston University, before he joined
NCI in 1984. Taylor worked at NCI with Schatzkin from the
early days of the Institute’s nutritional epidemiology and
cancer prevention research initiative and says “Arthur was
among the most idealistic” in the group focused on fi nding
the strongest form of evidence to change public health
practice. “He was incredible in his judgment to pick what was
most likely to be productive results” in designing randomised
trials in nutrition epidemiology research, he adds.
He is survived by his wife, Tamara Harris Schatzkin, who is
the Chief of Geriatric Epidemiology at the National Institute
on Aging, and by their children Eric and Rebecca Schatzkin.
Research Interests
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