Ethnic/race differences in the incidence of colorectal cancer in the USA

This diploma thesis deals with ethnic differences in the incidence of colorectal cancer. One of the primary aims is to analyze the influence of selected socio-demographic factors, health factors and lifestyle factors on the incidence of colorectal cancer. Another main aim is to find out if there are ethnic differences in the incidence of colorectal cancer in the United States to determine the contribution of the influence of selected socio-demographic and lifestyle factors using the data from the PLCO database. PLCO is a case-control study which includes individual data collected from approximately 155,000 respondents in the United States. The main finding is a significant influence of respondents' age structure, gender, ethnicity, education, family history of colorectal cancer as well as diabetes on the incidence of colorectal cancer. It has also been suggested that alcohol consumption, smoking and obesity increase the risk of colorectal cancer. On the contrary, an increased intake of vitamin D and drugs containing acetylsalicylic acid (in this case aspirin) reduces the risk of colorectal cancer. The influence of age structure and gender on the risk of developing colorectal cancer has been determined as statistically significant in African Americans, Caucasians and others (including the remaining..