Cancer Incident Rates: A Case Study

For the trend of the dependent variable, cancer incident rates, was decreasing over 2000-2014 overall. Although there were also some increases in between the time period, like 2001 and 2007, the overall trend was still decreasing. This was probably due to the increased public awareness towards cancer, therefore people were more willing to maintain a healthy lifestyle in order to prevent cancer. Also, Regular health check allowed early diagnosis and hence cancer cure rates increased and cancer mortality rate decreased.

The first independent variable, alcohol consumption per capita was found to have a negative correlation with the dependent variable cancer incident rates and a cause-and-effect- relationship. When more alcohol were consumed, the individual was less likely to get cancer. This was consistent with our hypothesis. Using red wine as an example, resveratrol in red wine is able to lower cancer incidence rates as resveratrol in red wine has anticancer properties (National Cancer Institute). However, the correlation between this pair of variable was only moderate as it only has a correlation coefficient of 0.5. The possible extraneous variables are the combined effect of tobacco and alcohol as well as gene that an individual carries.

In other words, greater amount of homicides an individual suffered, the greater risk for an individual to be diagnosed with cancer. In our hypothesis, we expected a very strong positive correlation between the two factors. In fact, after the outliers have been removed, a very strong positive correlation was revealed as the correlation coefficient increased dramatically from 0.48 to 0.96. Indicated by such change, we assured that our hypothesis was correct which was more homicides one suffered, higher possibility of him/her getting