Cancer incidence and socioeconomic geography of Finland: a correlation study

The influence that social determinants exert on cancer incidence and patterns is an expected aftermath of the predominantly environmental origin of cancer. This happens because social changes determine a wide range of individual behaviors, and hence of "proximate" causes of cancer. Whereas most of the previous social epidemiological studies focused on individual social classes and groups, in this paper we studied the influence of the social factors on cancer etiology at the larger scale of a whole country: Finland. The ecological analysis of cancer incidence and patterns in the Finnish regions pointed to both local and general correlations between tumors and socioeconomic descriptors. The most important correlations were: a) a general effect of economic and societal factors on cancer (namely, on the profiles of tumors in males and females, on the global cancer incidence in females, and on the difference in cancer incidence between the two sexes); b) a very specific pattern of correlations for the Ahvenanmaa islands; c) a clear geographic cline in tumor profile variability. The ecological epidemiology approach can provide important clues to public health policies.