Attachment 18 Memo Request Limited Ethnic category

Date:

March 1, 2012

TO:

Office of Management and Budget (OMB)

Through:

Keith Tucker, Reports Clearance Officer, HHS
Seleda Perryman, Program Clearance Officer, NIH
Vivian Horovitch-Kelley, PRA OMB Project Clearance Liaison, OMAA, NCI

FROM:

Nathaniel Rothman, M.D., M.P.H., M.H.S, NCI Project Officer
Senior Investigator and Head, Molecular Epidemiology Studies
Occupational and Environmental Epidemiology Branch
Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Statistics
National Cancer Institute (NCI)/NIH

SUBJECT:

Justification for Limited Ethnic/Racial categories for “A multi-center
international hospital-based case-control study of lymphoma in Asia
(AsiaLymph) (NCI)”

NCI requests authorization from OMB to approve the use of modified race and ethnicity
categories for this epidemiology study based on the 2011 HHS guidance that states, “The
specified race and ethnicity categories provide a minimum set of categories except when the
collection …focuses on a specific racial or ethnic group.”
This study proposes to collect information from patients with lymphoma or patients undergoing
surgery or other treatment for non-cancer related medical issues who live in Hong Kong, Taiwan,
and Chengdu and Tianjin, China will be enrolled at treating hospitals. This study population
involves only Chinese, including Han, who constitute the vast majority of Chinese living in these
geographic regions, and Chinese minority groups living in these regions. The “Other” category is
listed for both study subjects and their parents since some study subjects will come from mixed
Chinese and other ethnic group parentage. There are a relatively small numbers of individuals
from dozens of additional ethnic groups living in these regions and it is not possible to list them
all. The purpose of identifying “Other” is to use this information in statistical sensitivity analyses
where risk factors including genetic susceptibility for lymphoma will be analyzed for all study
subjects, and then only for those subjects without a mixed ethnic background.