Ethnic enclaves and colon cancer stage at diagnosis among New Jersey Hispanics

Ethnic enclaves are neighborhoods with high concentrations of individuals of the same ethnic origin. Researchers have hypothesized that residence in ethnic enclaves may contribute to cancer outcomes through detrimental or protective pathways. A limitation of previous work, however, is their cross-sectional approach whereby an individual's residence at the time of diagnosis was used to capture residence in an ethnic enclave at a single point in time. This study addresses this limitation by adopting a longitudinal approach to investigating the association between the duration of residence in an ethnic enclave and the colon cancer (CC) stage at diagnosis. Colon cancer incidence cases diagnosed between 2006 and 2014, for Hispanics aged 18 years and older from the New Jersey State Cancer Registry (NJSCR) were linked to residential histories obtained from a commercial database LexisNexis, Inc. We examined associations between residence in an enclave and stage at diagnosis using binary and multinomial logistic regression, adjusted for age, sex, primary payer, and marital status. Among the 1076 Hispanics diagnosed with invasive colon cancer in New Jersey from 2006 to 2014, 48.4% lived in a Hispanic enclave at the time of diagnosis. Over the ten years preceding CC diagnosis, 32.6% lived in an enclave for the entire period. We found that Hispanics living in an ethnic enclave at diagnosis had significantly lower odds of distant-stage CC than Hispanics not living in an enclave at the time of diagnosis. Additionally, we found a significant association between living in an enclave for an extended period (e.g., over ten years) and lower odds of being diagnosed with distant stage CC. Integrating residential histories opens research possibilities to examine how minorities' residential mobility and residence in enclaves affect cancer diagnosis over time.