14 ms·

Helpless to Prevent Cancer? Actually, Quite a Bit Is in Your Control

239 points by hvo 10y ago

known 10y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Paradox
roldie 10y ago
>A bigger concern to me is that people might interpret these findings as assigning fault to people who get cancer. You don’t want to get into situations where you feel as if people don’t deserve help because they didn’t try hard enough to stay healthy. Much of cancer is still out of people’s control. Although only one paragraph, I'm glad the author addressed this. All of these tips and lifestyle changes are great but this doesn't make those of us with loved ones with cancer feel any better. By all accounts she has done everything to qualify as "low risk," but still got cancer. It's still an odds game. Better odds don't guarantee anything. It's unfair, frustrating, and infuriating.
- randomgyatwork 10y ago
  I agree, a woman who worked for my mom died of lung cancer, she never smoked once in her life.
  - Declanomous 10y ago
    Lung cancer is most closely associated with smoking, but lung cancer can be caused by many air contaminants. Radon is the second leading cause of lung cancer, causing 21,000 deaths each year. About 2,900 of those people are non-smokers.[1] Cancer can be caused by things other than mutagens though. There is a certain rate of transcription errors when cells divide, and these errors can build up in the same way mutations from radiation, etc. build up. Things that kill cells and force them to divide speed up cell division, and can cause cancer that way. For instance, acid reflux and drinking can both cause esophageal cancer. You can also get cancer from just being extraordinarily unlucky. [1] https://www.epa.gov/radon/health-risk-radon https://www.epa.gov/radon/health-risk-radon
    - randomgyatwork 10y ago
      Thanks for giving me something to worry about.... But seriously, I had no idea that was a thing, thanks for bring it up.
- sliverstorm 10y ago
  On the bright side, I hear from medical friends that being otherwise really healthy is helpful because the doctors can hit you a lot harder with treatments like chemo and expect you to survive it.
MicroBerto 10y ago
I recently wrote an article discussing how increased fruits and vegetables can prevent mortality from cardiovascular diseases, yet not cancer.[1] My conclusion was that cancer is best prevented by removing negatives from life, not necessarily adding positives. ie avoid anything from stress to pollution to sunburn to obviously smoking. Interestingly, organic food doesn't seem to matter in the cancer equation, given the data we have. Yet there's one thing you can ADD to reduce cancer: exercise. Preferably moderately hard to strenuous. [1] https://blog.priceplow.com/vegetables https://blog.priceplow.com/vegetables
- rsync 10y ago
  "My conclusion was that cancer is best prevented by removing negatives from life, not necessarily adding positives." I'm also skeptical that adding foods/vitamins/supplements will prevent cancer. However, there is one area that adding things seems to be very beneficial, and that is adding things that promote regular bowel movements. There have been studies of heavy coffee drinkers and their reduced risks of colon cancer. Everyone is looking for some mysterious phenol or antioxidant from the coffee as a magic elixir, but I think it should be obvious that coffee as a laxative is the agent here. There's also the age-old rule of thumb: an apple a day keeps the doctor away. It's not the apple, it's the fiber.
  - MicroBerto 10y ago
    That's a great point. Thanks!
  - gmarx 10y ago
    When I was young the idea that high fiber reduces colon cancer risk was very high profile and based on pretty stupid studies. Later when more rigorous studies failed to find an association, no one noticed. It's like antioxidants and a host of other "eat this and you'll live forever" studies/stories. Regular bowel movements are their own reward!
- goda90 10y ago
  Well, eating fruits and vegetables is in a way removing the negatives of lacking certain nutrients, and consuming excesses of others such as sugar.
davidf18 10y ago
A lot of cancer is self-inflicted such as smoking cigarettes. Even though they know smoking is bad for them and they've had relatives that have died from tobacco, teens continue to use it and become addicted to smoking. In NYC, cigarettes cost $12-$14 per pack it is against the law to buy cigarettes until age 21. Countries that have universal healthcare such as Canada, UK, France all have tobacco taxes that exceed $5 per pack. Our US Federal tax is about $1. The high cost of tobacco and the increase age for buying tobacco (now the same as drinking alcohol which is also 21) helps to prevent teens from becoming using and becoming addicted to tobacco.
- dghughes 10y ago
  I was thinking the other day you don't see very many or any smokers or obese people in old age homes do you? The majority of my family on my father's side who are smokers have died of heart disease, strokes, lung damage. Even at my workplace 9 of 10 people who died were smokers. I think the buddy system where they need to smoke in groups just enforces their denial. I've seen the "scared straight" situation many times where a middle aged smoker suddenly decides to quit only to be diagnosed a month later with cancer. Only now it's e-cigarettes instead of quitting so they can still be addicted to nicotine but quit cigarettes. I like to tell them there are worse things than cancer which has a possibility of a cure or surgery. My dad has IPF a scarring of lung tissue and there is no chemo or surgery to cut it out or slow it down. It occurs from many years of small amounts of lung damage in my dad's situation it was blue collar work welding, paint fumes, wood dust, grinding dust etc.
known 10y ago
95 per cent of the targeted cancer cells die within two hours with new treatment that involves injecting a chemical compound, nitrobenzaldehyde, into the tumour and allowing it to diffuse into the tissue; http://sakshipost.com/index.php/lifestyle/editor-s-picks/84095-new-method-can-wipe-out-cancerous-tumours-in-two-hours.html http://sakshipost.com/index.php/lifestyle/editor-s-picks/840...
WorldMaker 10y ago
Obviously the easy way to prevent cancer is to just stop aging. We just need to unlock the means to micro-manage the cellular mitosis of all the trillions of cells in our bodies. Easy.~
nchelluri 10y ago
Interesting article. I don't know that I'd take too much to heart given some of the obvious caveats the author has been nice enough to make explicit, but it sounds like I'd be hard pressed to argue the suggestions contained within. For the tl;dr crowd: - written by a physician - people often think that heart disease is controllable by our actions whereas they feel that cancer is not - > people can’t change many risk factors of heart disease like age, race and family genetics - > A more recent study published in Nature argues that there is a lot we can do. [about cancer] - > Using sophisticated modeling techniques, the researchers argued that less than 30 percent of the lifetime risk of getting cancer was because of intrinsic risk factors, or the “bad luck.” - > [another study] identified four domains that are often noted to be related to disease prevention: smoking, drinking, obesity and exercise - if you limit that stuff, and not meaning 0 smoking, but "having quit within the last 5 years", no more than 1 drink a day (women) or 2 drinks a day (men), your BMI is >= 18.5 and <= 27.5 (BMI is such a shit and antiquated metric, IMO, incidentally), and perform 150mins/wk moderate intensity excercise or 75mins/wk vigorous intensity exercise, then you're in the low risk group. so the barrier to entry is not super high. HOWever: > No study is perfect, and this is no exception. These cohorts are overwhelmingly white and consist of health professionals, who are not necessarily like the population at large. But the checks against the national data showed that if anything, these results might be underestimating how much cancer is preventable by healthy behaviors. [...] Optimistic conclusion, for a skeptical cheapskate like myself, > As we talk about cancer “moonshots” that will most likely cost billions of dollars and might not achieve results, it’s worth considering that — as in many cases — prevention is not only the cheapest course, but also the most effective. Hard to fault this article. I'm glad you posted it, thank you.
- Retric 10y ago
  BMI is a surprisingly relevant metric for many things as it's a comparison between volume (weight) and surface area (height ^2). And yes, short people do have an inherent advantage there which for example possibly relates to how small dogs tend to live longer.
  - wil421 10y ago
    BMI is a horrible metric because it doesn't take body composition into account. I can't believe I was once almost considered obese with a body fat of less than 5%. 5'10" at 200-210.
serg_chernata 10y ago
This is great, and I think it should be fairly easy for everyone to follow in small measure at the very least. I'm not minimizing the struggles of those who can't control their weight or eating habits. I simply believe that people often pick something like a "diet" as their primary focus and then skip the workouts or continue to indulge in alcohol. I find it much easier to succeed when I attack the problem from more angles and try to make changes in all of these aspects to my routine. If one fails, I can still reap the benefits from the other changes I've made.
rhondapatrick 10y ago
It's amazing just how badly this study was distorted by generalized clickbaitism. It chafed me sufficiently enough to put out a video on the subject at the time[1]. The hype really wasn't even necessary... the underlying findings were plenty interesting enough already: that there is an association between stem cell division rate of specific tissues and overall cancer risk. This, however, in no way implies that cancer is only due to bad luck. Science ended up printing a follow-up actually clarify things, perhaps feeling themselves that the interpretation by the public at large got out of hand a little bit[2]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiH4m7NvV98 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiH4m7NvV98 [2] http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/01/bad-luck-and-cancer-science-reporter-s-reflections-controversial-story http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/01/bad-luck-and-cancer-s...
- nchelluri 10y ago
  IMO, the author does clarify this sufficiently, > In other words, this study argued that the more times D.N.A. replicates, the more often something can go wrong. Some took this to mean that cancer is much more because of “bad luck” than because of other factors that people could control. > Unfortunately, this simple explanation is not really what the study showed. Lung cells, for instance, divide quite rarely, and still account for a significant amount of cancer. Cells in the gastrointestinal tract divide all the time and account for many fewer cancers. Some cancers, like melanoma, were found to be in the group of cancers influenced more by intrinsic factors (or those we can’t control), when we clearly know that extrinsic factors, like sun exposure, are a major cause. as well, he only opens with that and aims to debunk the bad luck hypothesis by means of the other two studies. which again I personally have no idea about :)
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
reasonattlm 10y ago
If peak cancer years are two or more decades in your future, I'd argue that the best thing you can do today is donate to research programs that are likely to change the economic landscape of cancer research. You should also not get fat, not smoke, and all the other things that require no money, but research is much more transformative. You want the future to be no cancer, not less cancer. Why economic transformation in cancer research? The cancer research community suffers from a high level strategy problem: the majority of treatments are only applicable to a small number of cancer types, out of the hundreds of known types, and the majority of new technology platforms under development will be just as expensive to adapt to a different type of cancer as to build in the first place. A much more efficient approach is needed, as there are only so many researchers and only so much funding in the world. This is much on my mind because I'm helping to raise funds for one such project right now. It involves taking on the less well-supported but still necessary part of building a universal cancer treatment platform, one that can target all cancers. This could be built for about the same cost as one of today's highly specific single-cancer treatments. Obviously that is an immensely better path forward. The approach is to block telomere lengthening: all cancers must lengthen their telomeres in order to grow, and abuse a small number of target mechanisms in order to do so. These mechanisms, telomerase and alternative lengthening of telomeres (ALT), are very fundamental to cellular biochemistry. If they are turned off, it is expected that there is no way for a cancer to evolve around that dead end. Many of today's cancer therapies, in addition to being very specific, also leave room for a cancer cells to evolve a different way of conducting business that renders them immune. A number of research groups are working on sabotage of telomerase, but next to no-one is working on ALT. It is known that telomerase cancers can turn into ALT cancers, so it is probably the case that both doors have to be slammed shut to have a truly effective universal cancer therapy. So I'm helping a fundraiser to use an ALT assay to scan the standard drug candidate library for compounds that act to suppress ALT, something that should greatly advance that part of the field, both by identifying more lines of investigation, and by finding potential therapies for ALT cancers. Since ALT doesn't happen in normal cells, completely suppressing ALT should be a pretty safe treatment if an approach with limited side-effects can be identified. The telomerase blocking will need more work on compensating or targeting for other effects, since stem cells require it. But that is still a lot less work than producing one therapy per cancer type.
pmiller2 10y ago
I wonder what the psychology behind believing heart disease is preventable vs cancer being unpreventable.
- habosa 10y ago
  I think it's a much simpler disease to understand. Many forms of heart disease are easy to understand. My heart is blocked up with a fatty deposit because I ate too much junk food? Makes sense, I could stop doing that. Some of my skin cells are dividing uncontrollably because I sat in the sun too long 20 years ago? And somehow it's spreading to totally unrelated organs? I don't get it.
- coldtea 10y ago
  No deep psychology needed. With hearts, you open up and you see clogged arteries, for example. It doesn't get much simpler than "too much fat is bad for your heart". With cancer? It could be anything. And there are tons of different types, seemingly hitting all kinds of people, fat smokers and lean non-smoking vegans alike.
  - collyw 10y ago
    Stress is often a factor in health related issues. I imagine that believing it is preventable will lead to less stress.
  - QuercusMax 10y ago
    ...except fat isn't necessarily responsible for heart disease. High blood glucose and inflammation are much more likely to be responsible.
    - collyw 10y ago
      Have you any (peer reviewed) evidence of this? There is a lot of Internet hype about "carbs are bad, fat is fine" these days and other conflicting health guidelines. I am not saying its wrong, but I would like to see some proper evidence of it.
xchip 10y ago
Summary: reduce alcohol, don't smoke, stay fit. Yet another super long article that the bottom state the obvious.
- baytrailcat 10y ago
  Yea, no shit. This is pretty much common-sense advise by now. I was hoping for some new insights with respect to things like cell-phone usage, pesticides, low-carb diets, fasting or those so-called "anti-inflammatory" diets.
l1feh4ck 10y ago
To guys out there who still smoke. Please quit. It can be done.
- collyw 10y ago
  Does it matter if you live in a city where the air pollution is equivalent to smoking 20 a day? Get bikes please people.
- Stwerner 10y ago
  One trick that worked for me (pack+ a day smoker for 5+ years) was not exactly calling it "quitting". I had tried quitting a bunch of times, but every time I had a lapse in will power and had a cigarette, the justification to start again basically went "oh well, guess I failed quitting, time to go out and buy a pack." When I changed my mindset to more of a "I just don't really smoke anymore." it was ok to have one every once in a while when I was out with friends and not feel like I failed. Now I'm basically down to only one cigarette a year or two when I'm with old friends, and I usually feel bad enough in the morning after it that I don't really have any desire to smoke again for a long time.
  - tripzilch 10y ago
    It's really different for everyone. So I'll put this out as a word of caution: my response to that one accidental cigarette has been (twice) that cravings increase over the next couple of weeks, then I was having one random shitty night, and feeling all "fuck everything", bought a pack at the night store, and was back at square zero. I'm glad it works like this for you, though :)
- 6stringmerc 10y ago
  Well, frankly speaking, everybody does quit eventually. It's inevitable.
- csn 10y ago
  Yesterday I promised myself to not buy cigarettes anymore nor ask anyone to do it on my behalf. This first step only requires tremendous willpower when visiting a store, as the dispensers are placed at checkouts so I must stand right next to them when I'm in the queue.
Girlang 10y ago
Obesity causes cancer. Yet 66% of Americans choose to be obese or overweight.
apolretom 10y ago
> Over all, though, about 25 percent of cancer in women and 33 percent in men was potentially preventable. This article is a rather optimistic spin on these numbers. I'd have said "a large majority of cancer cases--75% in women and 67% in men--were not preventable"
- jessriedel 10y ago
  Perhaps more importantly, a huge fraction of those "preventable" cancers are lung cancers that could only be prevented by giving up smoking. > Lung cancer is by far the leading cause of cancer death among both men and women; about 1 out of 4 cancer deaths are from lung cancer. http://www.cancer.org/cancer/lungcancer-non-smallcell/detailedguide/non-small-cell-lung-cancer-key-statistics http://www.cancer.org/cancer/lungcancer-non-smallcell/detail... and from the article: > About 82 percent of women and 78 percent of men who got lung cancer might have prevented it through healthy behaviors. Back of the envelope: ~20 percent of all cancer deaths are lung cancer deaths that wouldn't have happened without smoking. That leaves just 5-15% of cancer deaths being "potentially preventable" once you've given up smoking. (Here, I'm not distinguishing between cancer cases and cancer deaths; please point to better data if you have it.) I'd wager less than 5% of cancer deaths are preventable if you neither smoke nor are overweight. I think this article, and especially its headline, is highly misleading.
- chias 10y ago
  Oh, I don't know. On the one hand, part of me agrees with you. On the other hand, when someone tells me that they've optimized a compiler and it can now compile 3% faster I get really excited and pull their repo, I don't turn around and say "you mean 97% as slow" and keep complaining about how long compilation takes and how nothing can be done about it. Show that there are steps you can take to cut it by 33% more than we currently know how and you'll be a god among programmers.
  - sn41 10y ago
    I agree with your basic point - but doesn't "3% faster" usually mean that it runs faster in all cases? So the "97% as slow" does not seem to be clear. Maybe it should be said as the improvement is not significant enough according to some numerical threshold?
mathgenius 10y ago
Here's what it would take to really prove the causative effects claimed in the article: pick a bunch of random people and then force them to either drink or not, exercise or not, smoke or not.. etc. There's no way anyone is ever going to do this experiment, and I just find the claims made in the article somewhat dubious as a result. On the other hand, they are likely to be right (yes?) and probably it's better to make such claims than not to. But hey, if you are a sedentary type, if you smoke, if you drink, what is causing those behaviours? Just forcing some exercise doesn't change those deeper causes (what ever bio/emoto/chemico causes), and may very well make the person absolutely miserable or worse.
Girlang 10y ago
To the 66% of you who are obese or overweight: put down the fork. It can be done.
- dang 10y ago
  We banned your many accounts from HN because of what I can only call obsessive obesity trolling. That's an abuse of this site, so please stop. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12041178 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12041178 and marked it off-topic.
elchief 10y ago
BMI is so bad. I'm 6'0 and the last time I was under BMI 25 I was a triathlete. The only way I could be <25 would be to exercise 3 hours a day and eat 1200 calories. F-off and die I did quit smoking though: - Really wanted to - Picked a good mental argument against it ($100k CAD over 20 years) - Picked a quit date - Patch + zyban + nicotene lozenges If you live in British Columbia, the government will pay for your patches or lozenges (hint: ask a friend)
- Benji_San 10y ago
  BMI isn't really reliable on a individual level as it doesn't take body composition into account. Athletes are generally "overweight" according to the BMI cutoff.
  - nradov 10y ago
    That's generally untrue. Winning endurance athletes are almost all in the normal BMI range. You'll only see "overweight" (by BMI) athletes in certain sports such as weightlifting and (American) football which require huge bursts of muscle power for only a few seconds at a time. Those are also the athletes who unfortunately tend to gain a lot of fat and have many health problems once they retire from competitive sports.
- Madmallard 10y ago
  Are you all muscle? If you were fat I'd suggest high fat low carb diet.
  - elchief 10y ago
    I think my celtic skeleton weighs 80 lbs
- maccard 10y ago
  I'm 6'1 and I had a BMI of about 26 until recently - I was definitely pudgy. I also claimed that BMI was worthless until I dropped a few pounds and realised that it was right and I was just making excuses. If you're an athlete, or a bodybuilder, or particularly tall or small, it won't necessarily fit you. but if you're of normal-ish stature (ie 5'4 to 6'3), and don't keep track of your weight, it's probably bang on.
grnadav1 10y ago
lol vegans have FAR LESS cancer (http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/2250052.html http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/2250052.html) but nooo, I won't go vegan - those peoplz ares crazies!!!11
- dominotw 10y ago
  not everyone is trying to live as long as possible.
- Joof 10y ago
  Is it because they are vegan or because vegans live healthier lifestyles?
  - geomark 10y ago
    Exactly. If there was strong evidence for causality I would make a real effort to go vegan. But I suspect it's about being thin and having a high fiber diet, which doesn't require being vegan.
    - retrogradeorbit 10y ago
      There is strong evidence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%E2%80%93Cornell%E2%80%93Oxford_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%E2%80%93Cornell%E2%80%93... It's the ratio of plant protein to animal protein in the diet. So no you don't need to go hard vegan. But yes, it is the diet and there is hard evidence.
      - Joof 10y ago
        That's pretty neat. Nutrition seems difficult to study because there are so many biological mechanisms at play, but we can get a rough picture at the macro level. Of course someone always blows findings out of proportion and decides to take things to an extreme.
      - pkroll 10y ago
        Criticism of "The China Study" pretty much ends my confidence in it: https://rawfoodsos.com/2010/07/07/the-china-study-fact-or-fallac/ https://rawfoodsos.com/2010/07/07/the-china-study-fact-or-fa...
fauigerzigerk 10y ago
I'd like to see a statistic that accounts for the fact that we all eventually die from _something_. If we measure success only by how many people eventually die from a particular disease, then increasing life expectancy doesn't count as success at all. Dying from cancer at the age of 90 should not be counted the same as dying of cancer at the age of 45. So the statistic I want to see would count cancer free years.
- barrkel 10y ago
  The NHS in the UK uses the concept of QALYs to measure the effectiveness of interventions: Quality Adjusted Life Years. If you have to avoid a certain activity, or take up a certain activity, in order to enhance your longevity, doing or not doing something you'd rather do (or not) may still affect your quality of life.
erikb 10y ago
At least in my section of this world people don't feel out of control about cancer. Trying to avoid things that "give you cancer" seem to be normal, even in lesser educated groups. Can't imagine it's so different in the US.
retrogradeorbit 10y ago
Two books on the subject I would recommend to the interested. One is "The China Study" and the other is "Cancer-Gate".

239 points by hvo 10y ago

known 10y ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Paradox

>A bigger concern to me is that people might interpret these findings as assigning fault to people who get cancer. You don’t want to get into situations where you feel as if people don’t deserve help because they didn’t try hard enough to stay healthy. Much of cancer is still out of people’s control. Although only one paragraph, I'm glad the author addressed this. All of these tips and lifestyle changes are great but this doesn't make those of us with loved ones with cancer feel any better. By all accounts she has done everything to qualify as "low risk," but still got cancer. It's still an odds game. Better odds don't guarantee anything. It's unfair, frustrating, and infuriating.

randomgyatwork 10y ago
I agree, a woman who worked for my mom died of lung cancer, she never smoked once in her life.
- Declanomous 10y ago
  Lung cancer is most closely associated with smoking, but lung cancer can be caused by many air contaminants. Radon is the second leading cause of lung cancer, causing 21,000 deaths each year. About 2,900 of those people are non-smokers.[1] Cancer can be caused by things other than mutagens though. There is a certain rate of transcription errors when cells divide, and these errors can build up in the same way mutations from radiation, etc. build up. Things that kill cells and force them to divide speed up cell division, and can cause cancer that way. For instance, acid reflux and drinking can both cause esophageal cancer. You can also get cancer from just being extraordinarily unlucky. [1] https://www.epa.gov/radon/health-risk-radon https://www.epa.gov/radon/health-risk-radon
  - randomgyatwork 10y ago
    Thanks for giving me something to worry about.... But seriously, I had no idea that was a thing, thanks for bring it up.
sliverstorm 10y ago
On the bright side, I hear from medical friends that being otherwise really healthy is helpful because the doctors can hit you a lot harder with treatments like chemo and expect you to survive it.

MicroBerto 10y ago

I recently wrote an article discussing how increased fruits and vegetables can prevent mortality from cardiovascular diseases, yet not cancer.[1] My conclusion was that cancer is best prevented by removing negatives from life, not necessarily adding positives. ie avoid anything from stress to pollution to sunburn to obviously smoking. Interestingly, organic food doesn't seem to matter in the cancer equation, given the data we have. Yet there's one thing you can ADD to reduce cancer: exercise. Preferably moderately hard to strenuous. [1] https://blog.priceplow.com/vegetables https://blog.priceplow.com/vegetables

rsync 10y ago
"My conclusion was that cancer is best prevented by removing negatives from life, not necessarily adding positives." I'm also skeptical that adding foods/vitamins/supplements will prevent cancer. However, there is one area that adding things seems to be very beneficial, and that is adding things that promote regular bowel movements. There have been studies of heavy coffee drinkers and their reduced risks of colon cancer. Everyone is looking for some mysterious phenol or antioxidant from the coffee as a magic elixir, but I think it should be obvious that coffee as a laxative is the agent here. There's also the age-old rule of thumb: an apple a day keeps the doctor away. It's not the apple, it's the fiber.
- MicroBerto 10y ago
  That's a great point. Thanks!
- gmarx 10y ago
  When I was young the idea that high fiber reduces colon cancer risk was very high profile and based on pretty stupid studies. Later when more rigorous studies failed to find an association, no one noticed. It's like antioxidants and a host of other "eat this and you'll live forever" studies/stories. Regular bowel movements are their own reward!
goda90 10y ago
Well, eating fruits and vegetables is in a way removing the negatives of lacking certain nutrients, and consuming excesses of others such as sugar.

davidf18 10y ago

A lot of cancer is self-inflicted such as smoking cigarettes. Even though they know smoking is bad for them and they've had relatives that have died from tobacco, teens continue to use it and become addicted to smoking. In NYC, cigarettes cost $12-$14 per pack it is against the law to buy cigarettes until age 21. Countries that have universal healthcare such as Canada, UK, France all have tobacco taxes that exceed $5 per pack. Our US Federal tax is about $1. The high cost of tobacco and the increase age for buying tobacco (now the same as drinking alcohol which is also 21) helps to prevent teens from becoming using and becoming addicted to tobacco.

dghughes 10y ago
I was thinking the other day you don't see very many or any smokers or obese people in old age homes do you? The majority of my family on my father's side who are smokers have died of heart disease, strokes, lung damage. Even at my workplace 9 of 10 people who died were smokers. I think the buddy system where they need to smoke in groups just enforces their denial. I've seen the "scared straight" situation many times where a middle aged smoker suddenly decides to quit only to be diagnosed a month later with cancer. Only now it's e-cigarettes instead of quitting so they can still be addicted to nicotine but quit cigarettes. I like to tell them there are worse things than cancer which has a possibility of a cure or surgery. My dad has IPF a scarring of lung tissue and there is no chemo or surgery to cut it out or slow it down. It occurs from many years of small amounts of lung damage in my dad's situation it was blue collar work welding, paint fumes, wood dust, grinding dust etc.

known 10y ago

95 per cent of the targeted cancer cells die within two hours with new treatment that involves injecting a chemical compound, nitrobenzaldehyde, into the tumour and allowing it to diffuse into the tissue; http://sakshipost.com/index.php/lifestyle/editor-s-picks/84095-new-method-can-wipe-out-cancerous-tumours-in-two-hours.html http://sakshipost.com/index.php/lifestyle/editor-s-picks/840...

WorldMaker 10y ago

Obviously the easy way to prevent cancer is to just stop aging. We just need to unlock the means to micro-manage the cellular mitosis of all the trillions of cells in our bodies. Easy.~

nchelluri 10y ago

Interesting article. I don't know that I'd take too much to heart given some of the obvious caveats the author has been nice enough to make explicit, but it sounds like I'd be hard pressed to argue the suggestions contained within. For the tl;dr crowd: - written by a physician - people often think that heart disease is controllable by our actions whereas they feel that cancer is not - > people can’t change many risk factors of heart disease like age, race and family genetics - > A more recent study published in Nature argues that there is a lot we can do. [about cancer] - > Using sophisticated modeling techniques, the researchers argued that less than 30 percent of the lifetime risk of getting cancer was because of intrinsic risk factors, or the “bad luck.” - > [another study] identified four domains that are often noted to be related to disease prevention: smoking, drinking, obesity and exercise - if you limit that stuff, and not meaning 0 smoking, but "having quit within the last 5 years", no more than 1 drink a day (women) or 2 drinks a day (men), your BMI is >= 18.5 and <= 27.5 (BMI is such a shit and antiquated metric, IMO, incidentally), and perform 150mins/wk moderate intensity excercise or 75mins/wk vigorous intensity exercise, then you're in the low risk group. so the barrier to entry is not super high. HOWever: > No study is perfect, and this is no exception. These cohorts are overwhelmingly white and consist of health professionals, who are not necessarily like the population at large. But the checks against the national data showed that if anything, these results might be underestimating how much cancer is preventable by healthy behaviors. [...] Optimistic conclusion, for a skeptical cheapskate like myself, > As we talk about cancer “moonshots” that will most likely cost billions of dollars and might not achieve results, it’s worth considering that — as in many cases — prevention is not only the cheapest course, but also the most effective. Hard to fault this article. I'm glad you posted it, thank you.

Retric 10y ago
BMI is a surprisingly relevant metric for many things as it's a comparison between volume (weight) and surface area (height ^2). And yes, short people do have an inherent advantage there which for example possibly relates to how small dogs tend to live longer.
- wil421 10y ago
  BMI is a horrible metric because it doesn't take body composition into account. I can't believe I was once almost considered obese with a body fat of less than 5%. 5'10" at 200-210.

serg_chernata 10y ago

This is great, and I think it should be fairly easy for everyone to follow in small measure at the very least. I'm not minimizing the struggles of those who can't control their weight or eating habits. I simply believe that people often pick something like a "diet" as their primary focus and then skip the workouts or continue to indulge in alcohol. I find it much easier to succeed when I attack the problem from more angles and try to make changes in all of these aspects to my routine. If one fails, I can still reap the benefits from the other changes I've made.

rhondapatrick 10y ago

It's amazing just how badly this study was distorted by generalized clickbaitism. It chafed me sufficiently enough to put out a video on the subject at the time[1]. The hype really wasn't even necessary... the underlying findings were plenty interesting enough already: that there is an association between stem cell division rate of specific tissues and overall cancer risk. This, however, in no way implies that cancer is only due to bad luck. Science ended up printing a follow-up actually clarify things, perhaps feeling themselves that the interpretation by the public at large got out of hand a little bit[2]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiH4m7NvV98 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiH4m7NvV98 [2] http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/01/bad-luck-and-cancer-science-reporter-s-reflections-controversial-story http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/01/bad-luck-and-cancer-s...

nchelluri 10y ago
IMO, the author does clarify this sufficiently, > In other words, this study argued that the more times D.N.A. replicates, the more often something can go wrong. Some took this to mean that cancer is much more because of “bad luck” than because of other factors that people could control. > Unfortunately, this simple explanation is not really what the study showed. Lung cells, for instance, divide quite rarely, and still account for a significant amount of cancer. Cells in the gastrointestinal tract divide all the time and account for many fewer cancers. Some cancers, like melanoma, were found to be in the group of cancers influenced more by intrinsic factors (or those we can’t control), when we clearly know that extrinsic factors, like sun exposure, are a major cause. as well, he only opens with that and aims to debunk the bad luck hypothesis by means of the other two studies. which again I personally have no idea about :)

deleted 10y ago

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reasonattlm 10y ago

If peak cancer years are two or more decades in your future, I'd argue that the best thing you can do today is donate to research programs that are likely to change the economic landscape of cancer research. You should also not get fat, not smoke, and all the other things that require no money, but research is much more transformative. You want the future to be no cancer, not less cancer. Why economic transformation in cancer research? The cancer research community suffers from a high level strategy problem: the majority of treatments are only applicable to a small number of cancer types, out of the hundreds of known types, and the majority of new technology platforms under development will be just as expensive to adapt to a different type of cancer as to build in the first place. A much more efficient approach is needed, as there are only so many researchers and only so much funding in the world. This is much on my mind because I'm helping to raise funds for one such project right now. It involves taking on the less well-supported but still necessary part of building a universal cancer treatment platform, one that can target all cancers. This could be built for about the same cost as one of today's highly specific single-cancer treatments. Obviously that is an immensely better path forward. The approach is to block telomere lengthening: all cancers must lengthen their telomeres in order to grow, and abuse a small number of target mechanisms in order to do so. These mechanisms, telomerase and alternative lengthening of telomeres (ALT), are very fundamental to cellular biochemistry. If they are turned off, it is expected that there is no way for a cancer to evolve around that dead end. Many of today's cancer therapies, in addition to being very specific, also leave room for a cancer cells to evolve a different way of conducting business that renders them immune. A number of research groups are working on sabotage of telomerase, but next to no-one is working on ALT. It is known that telomerase cancers can turn into ALT cancers, so it is probably the case that both doors have to be slammed shut to have a truly effective universal cancer therapy. So I'm helping a fundraiser to use an ALT assay to scan the standard drug candidate library for compounds that act to suppress ALT, something that should greatly advance that part of the field, both by identifying more lines of investigation, and by finding potential therapies for ALT cancers. Since ALT doesn't happen in normal cells, completely suppressing ALT should be a pretty safe treatment if an approach with limited side-effects can be identified. The telomerase blocking will need more work on compensating or targeting for other effects, since stem cells require it. But that is still a lot less work than producing one therapy per cancer type.

pmiller2 10y ago

I wonder what the psychology behind believing heart disease is preventable vs cancer being unpreventable.

habosa 10y ago
I think it's a much simpler disease to understand. Many forms of heart disease are easy to understand. My heart is blocked up with a fatty deposit because I ate too much junk food? Makes sense, I could stop doing that. Some of my skin cells are dividing uncontrollably because I sat in the sun too long 20 years ago? And somehow it's spreading to totally unrelated organs? I don't get it.
coldtea 10y ago
No deep psychology needed. With hearts, you open up and you see clogged arteries, for example. It doesn't get much simpler than "too much fat is bad for your heart". With cancer? It could be anything. And there are tons of different types, seemingly hitting all kinds of people, fat smokers and lean non-smoking vegans alike.
- collyw 10y ago
  Stress is often a factor in health related issues. I imagine that believing it is preventable will lead to less stress.
- QuercusMax 10y ago
  ...except fat isn't necessarily responsible for heart disease. High blood glucose and inflammation are much more likely to be responsible.
  - collyw 10y ago
    Have you any (peer reviewed) evidence of this? There is a lot of Internet hype about "carbs are bad, fat is fine" these days and other conflicting health guidelines. I am not saying its wrong, but I would like to see some proper evidence of it.

xchip 10y ago

Summary: reduce alcohol, don't smoke, stay fit. Yet another super long article that the bottom state the obvious.

baytrailcat 10y ago
Yea, no shit. This is pretty much common-sense advise by now. I was hoping for some new insights with respect to things like cell-phone usage, pesticides, low-carb diets, fasting or those so-called "anti-inflammatory" diets.

l1feh4ck 10y ago

To guys out there who still smoke. Please quit. It can be done.

collyw 10y ago
Does it matter if you live in a city where the air pollution is equivalent to smoking 20 a day? Get bikes please people.
Stwerner 10y ago
One trick that worked for me (pack+ a day smoker for 5+ years) was not exactly calling it "quitting". I had tried quitting a bunch of times, but every time I had a lapse in will power and had a cigarette, the justification to start again basically went "oh well, guess I failed quitting, time to go out and buy a pack." When I changed my mindset to more of a "I just don't really smoke anymore." it was ok to have one every once in a while when I was out with friends and not feel like I failed. Now I'm basically down to only one cigarette a year or two when I'm with old friends, and I usually feel bad enough in the morning after it that I don't really have any desire to smoke again for a long time.
- tripzilch 10y ago
  It's really different for everyone. So I'll put this out as a word of caution: my response to that one accidental cigarette has been (twice) that cravings increase over the next couple of weeks, then I was having one random shitty night, and feeling all "fuck everything", bought a pack at the night store, and was back at square zero. I'm glad it works like this for you, though :)
6stringmerc 10y ago
Well, frankly speaking, everybody does quit eventually. It's inevitable.
csn 10y ago
Yesterday I promised myself to not buy cigarettes anymore nor ask anyone to do it on my behalf. This first step only requires tremendous willpower when visiting a store, as the dispensers are placed at checkouts so I must stand right next to them when I'm in the queue.

Girlang 10y ago

Obesity causes cancer. Yet 66% of Americans choose to be obese or overweight.

apolretom 10y ago

> Over all, though, about 25 percent of cancer in women and 33 percent in men was potentially preventable. This article is a rather optimistic spin on these numbers. I'd have said "a large majority of cancer cases--75% in women and 67% in men--were not preventable"

jessriedel 10y ago
Perhaps more importantly, a huge fraction of those "preventable" cancers are lung cancers that could only be prevented by giving up smoking. > Lung cancer is by far the leading cause of cancer death among both men and women; about 1 out of 4 cancer deaths are from lung cancer. http://www.cancer.org/cancer/lungcancer-non-smallcell/detailedguide/non-small-cell-lung-cancer-key-statistics http://www.cancer.org/cancer/lungcancer-non-smallcell/detail... and from the article: > About 82 percent of women and 78 percent of men who got lung cancer might have prevented it through healthy behaviors. Back of the envelope: ~20 percent of all cancer deaths are lung cancer deaths that wouldn't have happened without smoking. That leaves just 5-15% of cancer deaths being "potentially preventable" once you've given up smoking. (Here, I'm not distinguishing between cancer cases and cancer deaths; please point to better data if you have it.) I'd wager less than 5% of cancer deaths are preventable if you neither smoke nor are overweight. I think this article, and especially its headline, is highly misleading.
chias 10y ago
Oh, I don't know. On the one hand, part of me agrees with you. On the other hand, when someone tells me that they've optimized a compiler and it can now compile 3% faster I get really excited and pull their repo, I don't turn around and say "you mean 97% as slow" and keep complaining about how long compilation takes and how nothing can be done about it. Show that there are steps you can take to cut it by 33% more than we currently know how and you'll be a god among programmers.
- sn41 10y ago
  I agree with your basic point - but doesn't "3% faster" usually mean that it runs faster in all cases? So the "97% as slow" does not seem to be clear. Maybe it should be said as the improvement is not significant enough according to some numerical threshold?

mathgenius 10y ago

Here's what it would take to really prove the causative effects claimed in the article: pick a bunch of random people and then force them to either drink or not, exercise or not, smoke or not.. etc. There's no way anyone is ever going to do this experiment, and I just find the claims made in the article somewhat dubious as a result. On the other hand, they are likely to be right (yes?) and probably it's better to make such claims than not to. But hey, if you are a sedentary type, if you smoke, if you drink, what is causing those behaviours? Just forcing some exercise doesn't change those deeper causes (what ever bio/emoto/chemico causes), and may very well make the person absolutely miserable or worse.

Girlang 10y ago

To the 66% of you who are obese or overweight: put down the fork. It can be done.

dang 10y ago
We banned your many accounts from HN because of what I can only call obsessive obesity trolling. That's an abuse of this site, so please stop. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12041178 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12041178 and marked it off-topic.

elchief 10y ago

BMI is so bad. I'm 6'0 and the last time I was under BMI 25 I was a triathlete. The only way I could be <25 would be to exercise 3 hours a day and eat 1200 calories. F-off and die I did quit smoking though: - Really wanted to - Picked a good mental argument against it ($100k CAD over 20 years) - Picked a quit date - Patch + zyban + nicotene lozenges If you live in British Columbia, the government will pay for your patches or lozenges (hint: ask a friend)

Benji_San 10y ago
BMI isn't really reliable on a individual level as it doesn't take body composition into account. Athletes are generally "overweight" according to the BMI cutoff.
- nradov 10y ago
  That's generally untrue. Winning endurance athletes are almost all in the normal BMI range. You'll only see "overweight" (by BMI) athletes in certain sports such as weightlifting and (American) football which require huge bursts of muscle power for only a few seconds at a time. Those are also the athletes who unfortunately tend to gain a lot of fat and have many health problems once they retire from competitive sports.
Madmallard 10y ago
Are you all muscle? If you were fat I'd suggest high fat low carb diet.
- elchief 10y ago
  I think my celtic skeleton weighs 80 lbs
maccard 10y ago
I'm 6'1 and I had a BMI of about 26 until recently - I was definitely pudgy. I also claimed that BMI was worthless until I dropped a few pounds and realised that it was right and I was just making excuses. If you're an athlete, or a bodybuilder, or particularly tall or small, it won't necessarily fit you. but if you're of normal-ish stature (ie 5'4 to 6'3), and don't keep track of your weight, it's probably bang on.

grnadav1 10y ago

lol vegans have FAR LESS cancer (http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/2250052.html http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/2250052.html) but nooo, I won't go vegan - those peoplz ares crazies!!!11

dominotw 10y ago
not everyone is trying to live as long as possible.
Joof 10y ago
Is it because they are vegan or because vegans live healthier lifestyles?
- geomark 10y ago
  Exactly. If there was strong evidence for causality I would make a real effort to go vegan. But I suspect it's about being thin and having a high fiber diet, which doesn't require being vegan.
  - retrogradeorbit 10y ago
    There is strong evidence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%E2%80%93Cornell%E2%80%93Oxford_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%E2%80%93Cornell%E2%80%93... It's the ratio of plant protein to animal protein in the diet. So no you don't need to go hard vegan. But yes, it is the diet and there is hard evidence.
    - Joof 10y ago
      That's pretty neat. Nutrition seems difficult to study because there are so many biological mechanisms at play, but we can get a rough picture at the macro level. Of course someone always blows findings out of proportion and decides to take things to an extreme.
    - pkroll 10y ago
      Criticism of "The China Study" pretty much ends my confidence in it: https://rawfoodsos.com/2010/07/07/the-china-study-fact-or-fallac/ https://rawfoodsos.com/2010/07/07/the-china-study-fact-or-fa...

fauigerzigerk 10y ago

I'd like to see a statistic that accounts for the fact that we all eventually die from _something_. If we measure success only by how many people eventually die from a particular disease, then increasing life expectancy doesn't count as success at all. Dying from cancer at the age of 90 should not be counted the same as dying of cancer at the age of 45. So the statistic I want to see would count cancer free years.

barrkel 10y ago
The NHS in the UK uses the concept of QALYs to measure the effectiveness of interventions: Quality Adjusted Life Years. If you have to avoid a certain activity, or take up a certain activity, in order to enhance your longevity, doing or not doing something you'd rather do (or not) may still affect your quality of life.

erikb 10y ago

At least in my section of this world people don't feel out of control about cancer. Trying to avoid things that "give you cancer" seem to be normal, even in lesser educated groups. Can't imagine it's so different in the US.

retrogradeorbit 10y ago

Two books on the subject I would recommend to the interested. One is "The China Study" and the other is "Cancer-Gate".