"That would lead one to assume that if an area becomes gentrified, then the proportion of breast cancer cases diagnosed with distant metastases would decline, and patients should have a better chance for survival.

"Our study showed that is not true."

The researchers analyzed Illinois State Cancer Registry data in conjunction with Cook County census tract data. The cancer data included information on age, race, ethnicity and stage at diagnosis for 21,516 breast cancer cases between 1994 and 2000 among women living in Cook County.

"Chicago is a great laboratory to study racial and ethnic disparities in health, and how your neighborhood can affect your health," said Barrett, who is an associate professor of sociology at UIC.

To measure neighborhood change between 1990 and 2000, the researchers tracked changes in owner-occupied housing values, professional and managerial employment, and adults with a college education.

The researchers found that women living in neighborhoods with concentrated disadvantage, concentrated levels of immigration, and lower levels of affluence in 1990 ran a greater risk of distant-stage diagnosis of breast cancer. Yet when some of these neighborhoods gentrified, women there ran a higher risk of distant-stage metastasis of breast cancer than did women living in similar neighborhoods that did not gentrify.

The UIC researchers suggest that women living in upward-changing neighborhoods may experience disruption of social networks, interruption in access to health care services, and stress relating to social isolation and financial problems as housing costs rise.

The study was funded by a National Cancer Institute grant to the UIC Center for Population Health and Health Disparities, one of eight National Institutes of Health-funded centers to study racial and ethnic disparities in health.

Co-authors include Young Cho, Kathryn Weaver (now of the National Cancer Institute), Kirak Ryu, Richard Campbell, Therese Dolecek, and Richard Warnecke of UIC.

Barrett is bringing this research to the classroom this spring in an undergraduate sociology course, Health, Race and Neighborhoods.

UIC ranks among the nation's top 50 universities in federal research funding and is Chicago's largest university with 25,000 students, 12,000 faculty and staff, 15 colleges and the state's major public medical center. A hallmark of the campus is the Great Cities Commitment, through which UIC faculty, students and staff engage with community, corporate, foundation and government partners in hundreds of programs to improve the quality of life in metropolitan areas around the world.