4 ms·
Small nit. Smoking, alcohol, and high BMI are the big risk factors, but not causes. The interesting question is why these risk factors are associated with cance
by francisofascii 4y ago
Small nit. Smoking, alcohol, and high BMI are the big risk factors, but not causes. The interesting question is why these risk factors are associated with cancer.
- yamrzou 4y agoTrue, I edited the title to reflect that.
- ctrlmeta 4y agoWhy not preserve the original title? "Smoking and other risk factors cause almost half of cancer deaths, study finds" Accurate or not, that's the original title of the article.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bena 4y agoReal broad strokes here. Cancer isn't a disease. It's a class of diseases. It's a class of diseases characterized by the inability of your cells to regulate reproduction. Typically caused by cells that had errors in reproduction. Caused by various mutations. Those mutations are more likely with the introduction of certain things. All of those things, smoking, alcohol, high BMI, are things that cause more mutations. Either through more reproduction or affecting that reproduction. We kind of "get" cancer all the time. You could have cancer right now. But usually our body is good at getting rid of it by itself. It's when it can't that it becomes a problem.
- Rury 4y agoRight, and for some more detail, recent studies on cellular energy metabolism and epigenetics suggests that DNA damage may happen more often when you're eating or metabolizing. This is because, your cells tend to reproduce when it has available food, and in order to reproduce, they need to make a copy of your DNA, and so it must open up structures and read your DNA to make a copy of the DNA. However, DNA is at greater risk of being damaged/corrupted (from chemicals like those in smoking, or food itself) when this process is occurring because the DNA is open for access, rather than being in an otherwise mostly packaged/protected state.
- porknubbins 4y agoI’m not clear what the takeaway from this is as a human on the macro scale. Is this just support for time restricted eating? Presumably most adult humans have, all else equal, roughly the same number of cells that live on average X days and then must copy themselves at some point during their lifespan. If I space my eating out to small amounts over the whole day but don’t increase calories am I going to get more DNA damage without more net cell growth in numbers?
- ehnto 4y agoI'm sure there's causal effects in there, but I also wonder if it's not similar to how riding an unregistered motorcycle puts you in a much higher risk cohort. Of course, riding an unregistered bike is not going to cause an accident, but it's a behavior of people with very high risk profiles. As a motorcyclist, if you have a license, and your bike is registered, you become part of a behavior cohort that's barely represented in crash statistics when compared to the other cohort. Someone who's likely to smoke, is potentially the type of person who doesn't take care of themselves in a number of dimensions, putting them in a higher risk behavior cohort.
- ReptileMan 4y agoConstant inflammation at least for BMI and smoking.
- bregma 4y agoCorrelation is causation, at least at the 6th-grade reading level.
- potatoman22 4y agoI'm pretty sure scientists agreed 60 years ago that smoking causes lung cancer. They are not only correlated, one causes the other.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]