About Cincinnati BCERP
The Breast Cancer and the Environment Research Program (BCERP) is a part of a network of projects funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) and the National Cancer Institute (NCI). The focus of all of these projects is to study impact of environmental exposures on susceptibility to breast cancer. Three of these projects study how environmental exposures affect the timing of breast development and other benchmarks of puberty in young girls.
The puberty study projects are located at:
- The University of Cincinnati and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center
- Mount Sinai School of Medicine
- The University of California San Francisco
Each project has its own specific epidemiology and/or biological research focus and a community outreach and translation core (COTC). Researchers in the epidemiology study at Cincinnati’s BCERP are studying the role environmental exposures, genetic variants, and social and lifestyle factors play in the timing of puberty and how this timing relates to breast cancer susceptibility in later life.