Arthur Gould Schatzkin – 50th Reunion Essay

Arthur Gould Schatzkin

Date of Death: 20-Jan-2011

College: Calhoun

(This memorial appeared in the New York Times, February 11, 2011.)

Dr. Arthur Schatzkin, an epidemiologist whose investigations into the connections between diet and cancer yielded new analytic tools and led to the discovery that eating fiber did not prevent the recurrence of polyps in the colon, died on Jan. 20 in Chevy Chase, Md. The cause was brain cancer, said the National Cancer Institute, where Dr. Schatzkin was chief of the nutritional epidemiology branch in the division of cancer epidemiology.

Dr. Schatzkin attracted worldwide attention in 2000 when he reported on a large-scale experiment to see whether a high-fiber diet might curb the recurrence of polyps in the colon and rectum. Such polyps can become malignant. Dividing 2,079 people into two groups, he put one group on a low-fat, high-fiber diet calling for lots of fruits and vegetables, and he had the other group’s members follow their usual diets. He concluded that the special diet had no effect on the recurrence of polyps.

The delicacy in establishing links between food and cancer made Dr. Schatzkin cautious in offering dietary recommendations. His polyp study, he noted, showed only that eating fiber had no effect in stopping the future growth of another polyp. It did not address whether eating fiber would prevent a polyp in the first place, or whether it would have any influence on a polyp developing into a cancerous tumor.

One of Dr. Schatzkin’s later initiatives, however, did find evidence that a particular kind of fiber, from unrefined whole grains, might reduce the risk of colorectal cancer. The discovery was made through a database of more than 500,000 individuals that Dr. Schatzkin had put together in the 1990s. It has yielded more than 100 studies that have found significant relationships between body mass and mortality and between eating meat and liver cancer, among other things.

To create the database, Dr. Schatzkin enlisted AARP, the organization for older Americans, to provide volunteers. More than 560,000 men and women over 50 agreed to fill out periodic questionnaires about diet, physical activity, family health history and other information. When the data are combined with records of mortality and disease incidence, researchers can tease out correlations between diet and disease.

“Nothing like this had ever been initiated,” Dr. Rashmi Sinha, a senior investigator at the cancer institute, said of the database in an interview on Tuesday.

Arthur Gould Schatzkin was born on Feb. 11, 1948, in New York City, and graduated from Yale and the State University of New York Downstate College of Medicine. He earned master’s and doctorate degrees in public health from Columbia. He joined the National Cancer Institute in 1984 and became the chief of nutritional epidemiology in 1999. He increased the number of scientists working in his branch to 26, from four or five. Dr. Schatzkin is survived by his wife, Dr. Tamara Harris Schatzkin, chief of geriatric epidemiology at the National Institute on Aging; their children, Eric and Rebecca Schatzkin; a sister, Dorothy Schatzkin Higgins; and a brother, Paul.