Social epidemiology: the challenges and opportunities of worldwide data consortia

Over the last few decades, social epidemiology has developed as a solid epidemiology branch, focusing on understanding how social experiences influence population health. At the same time, growing of collaborative and interdisciplinary research led to the proliferation of multi-institutional consortia, able to assess and quantify risk-disease associations of interest with a higher degree of accuracy, to explore subgroups of the population, and to investigate interactions between environmental, genetic, and socioeconomic factors. Increasing evidence shows that low Socioeconomic Position (SEP) is a strong determinant of morbidity and premature mortality from selected non-communicable diseases, including several cancers. Thus, an accurate quantification of the impact of SEP on cancer risk is of major importance to plan public health interventions for cancer incidence and socioeconomic disparities reduction. Large data consortia as the Stomach Cancer Pooling (StoP) Project and the International Head and Neck Cancer Epidemiology (INHANCE), in which the University of Milan is proactively involved, allowed investigators to address the effects of education and household income, the main SEP determinants, on gastric and head and neck cancer, respectively, confirming the existence of a strong association between low SEP and those major neoplasms.