Roxbury Lupus Project
The BWH Lupus Center has been involved in investigating possible environmental exposures in the Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan neighborhoods of Boston. Reports of potential clusters or outbreak in these neighborhoods triggered this research project.
Together with the Women of Courage, a local support group for women with lupus, Dr. Patricia Fraser and her colleagues led a community effort to identify and enroll people with lupus, their family members and healthy women in the community into a study. Together with the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, they found some evidence that living near hazardous waste sites may shorten the time to the diagnosis of lupus in people who also have certain genes.
They are now studying the connection between past exposure to silica from construction work and sandblasting and an increase in risk of developing lupus.
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