Which regions of the country are most prone to cancer?
Select a state to view mean cancer incidence per 100,000 people. The highest regions correspond with the Northeastern United States and outliers like Kentucky, Illinois, and Louisiana. This visualization also appears in the Cancer Incidence Group Project.
How do factors affecting incidence vary by region?
This dashboard explores where cancer occurs and why. A state-level map shows incidence rate by region alongside death rate, where larger indicators represent higher death rates. The correlation generally shows higher death rates where incidence is higher, such as in NY and PA, but some outliers still have a high death rate at middle-of-the-road incidence rates. Two correlation views relate income and poverty to death and incidence rates. Texas stands out with both high poverty and high death rate overall, as well as high median income and high incidence rate. In both correlations, the Northeast appears in the upper-right quadrant, indicating a strong relationship with these factors. For context, a bar chart shows the five-year trend among states and their recent trends.
New York State Focus
The county with the highest incidence is Suffolk County. Following that, in the next two charts, the death rate and poverty percentage are compared, as well as the incidence rate and the median income. Suffolk County is at the top end of both. It shows high poverty, high median income, high death rate, and high incidence rate, which is not dissimilar to how Texas reports. Often, cancer treatments are costly, so it is intuitive to expect higher-income areas to have a lower death rate, but that is not the case here. This is also a limitation in the data because we do not know whether treatments occurred before death or whether cancer cases apply disproportionately to the high-poverty population. Health professionals should further dissect the data to determine who is being affected socioeconomically, because the summary chart shows that the lower the median income, the lower the death rate.
Project Summary
The challenges in this project were finding factors relevant to cancer rates without redundancy. There was preprocessing to clean and verify values, including removing null values. The data was accumulated from United States Cancer Statistics and public repositories, as well as the U.S. Census for population statistics. The dashboards provide clarity on relationships within the dataset and a starting point for health professionals to decide how to approach this issue.
Key findings: cancer incidence is highest in the Northeastern United States, with notable outliers such as Kentucky, Illinois, and Louisiana. High-income areas are not immune to cancer incidence and death rates, which indicates that access to medical intervention does not always reduce incidences or deaths. While New York is surrounded by other states that also have high cancer rates, it stands out with a distributed rate across counties.
Recommendations: use these visualizations to target high-incidence areas for prevention. Areas with both high incidence and high poverty can expand preventive healthcare opportunities at lower cost to mitigate death rates.
Limitations: the data is an amalgamation of sources and some of it is incomplete. It does not provide a holistic view of diagnoses. The dataset is also limited in its ability to capture socioeconomic indicators that are causal rather than merely correlated.