3 ms·

> If you live long enough, you will get cancer Is this true, though? The really old rarely die from cancer, it seems. http://z3.invisionfree.com/The_110_Club/

by wozer 13y ago

> If you live long enough, you will get cancer Is this true, though? The really old rarely die from cancer, it seems. http://z3.invisionfree.com/The_110_Club/index.php?showtopic=8049 http://z3.invisionfree.com/The_110_Club/index.php?showtopic=...

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
jpollock 13y ago
They don't die _from_ cancer, but they tend to _have_ cancer when they die. Tumours in old people grow slowly.
- asveikau 13y ago
  > Tumours in old people grow slowly. Anyone else read this and fantasize about the world's most ironic cancer treatment? If we could somehow speed up the aging process... (No I'm not serious...)
- Terr_ 13y ago
  More like tumors in old people who did not die from the cancer are tumors which grew slowly.
Retric 13y ago
It's not that the risk of cancer goes down it's that all the other risks goes up. Remember really old people have a 50/50 chance of death per year risk and your cancer risk is lower than that. But long term even a 1 in 200 risk of death per year will still kill you. Anyway, I don't really see the problem with rich people living longer lives. Dynastic wealth still lingers around and ends up in the hands of incompetent people which is probably a worse outcome.
- waps 13y ago
  This is a book about the tradeoffs (if you're God/Darwin) of death. Really, really interesting book : http://www.amazon.com/Sex-Origins-Death-William-Clark/dp/0195121198 http://www.amazon.com/Sex-Origins-Death-William-Clark/dp/019... He first frames the problem. Firstly pointing out that not all parts of the human body are subject to death. Every cell in your body was alive 180000 years ago when the human race first emerged, and even 3 billion years ago when the first cells really started happening. Every cell in your body and, indeed, you yourself are part of the original cell's lifespan. Second he goes over a lot of experiments that indeed point out the trade-off that God is making here : either you die, or you become a cancerous blob, over time. Not creating the situation where cancer will eventually win is also a no-go, for other reasons. Thirdly, he points out, mathematically, what death is and isn't for a human. It isn't nearly as clear-cut as you might think. He also gives the philosophical reasons why death may indeed not be the end of existence (well it isn't, if you have kids, for obvious reasons, but it may also not be the end of your conscious existence for other reasons). Really, this book will change your thinking on death a lot, and after reading it you will understand that not dieing is something that will come with massive consequences.
  - Retric 13y ago
    Your falling pray to survivors bias. If you pick a cell and after each time it reproduces you pick just one of it's decedents as the 'original' then they don't actually last all that long on average. Sure, single celled organisms don't have a built in lifespan but without reproduction anything can wipe them out and you can easily find an average lifespan that's not all that long. As to redefining things so there is only a single cell on the planet that's meaningless. Transcription errors occur all the time to the point where most of the cells in your body don't share the same DNA. Some people even contain a large number of their siblings cells to the point where DNA tests are less reliable than you might think. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_(genetics) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_(genetics) Multi celled organisms are best thought of like a country it's an agreement between a group of similar cells. As such theirs plenty of edge cases where something is both a viable single celled organism and part of an a collective. Specialization is more efficient but not really necessary. As such it's easy to see just how multi celled organisms evolve, but also how cancer is basically inevitable because breaking that agreement does not prevent a cell from being viable in the short term. It also demonstrates that sharing DNA is not really nessiary as for example gut bacteria play a vary useful role dispite sharing any DNA with their host. PS: In the life sciences edge cases can get really strange. As in the closest genetic species to humans is a bunch of single celled organisms not monkey's. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa
nnq 13y ago
Because the heart and circulatory system accumulate damage and fail first in very old age. Yes, the risk of cancer fall a little with old age (or at least the speed of progression - most of the very old that die of heart disease and stroke probably have lots of incipient cancers that would have taken much longer to kill them). This risk never falls to zero or negligible and all anti-aging and regenerative therapies will reverse this - in a system where everything works slower and worse, even cancer works slower. And if you look at that list for example, you see that most of those causes of death are thing that would have been harmless to a person without cardiovascular diseases. Taking some of the examples: the long list of pneumonias is because old people that get stuck in bed because of a stroke or heart failure usually get "aspiration pneumonia" or that the buildup of fluid in lungs due to hart failure leads to a series of complications fatal when coupled with a pneumonia. The only causes from that list that were probably not related to cardiovascular disease, besides the cancers, are probably the 2 kidney failures (...if you don't assume things like renal artery stenosis due to aterosclerosys or aterosclerosys and hypertension related kidney disease). Also, things like "organ failure" are a way of describing the consequences not the cause - there was a cause for that organ failure, just that the pathologist didn't bother looking into it. And unless there is a real suspicion of criminal action, no path exams for the causes of death in old people are really conducted scientifically anywhere in the world.

by wozer 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

jpollock 13y ago

They don't die _from_ cancer, but they tend to _have_ cancer when they die. Tumours in old people grow slowly.

asveikau 13y ago
> Tumours in old people grow slowly. Anyone else read this and fantasize about the world's most ironic cancer treatment? If we could somehow speed up the aging process... (No I'm not serious...)
Terr_ 13y ago
More like tumors in old people who did not die from the cancer are tumors which grew slowly.

Retric 13y ago

It's not that the risk of cancer goes down it's that all the other risks goes up. Remember really old people have a 50/50 chance of death per year risk and your cancer risk is lower than that. But long term even a 1 in 200 risk of death per year will still kill you. Anyway, I don't really see the problem with rich people living longer lives. Dynastic wealth still lingers around and ends up in the hands of incompetent people which is probably a worse outcome.

waps 13y ago
This is a book about the tradeoffs (if you're God/Darwin) of death. Really, really interesting book : http://www.amazon.com/Sex-Origins-Death-William-Clark/dp/0195121198 http://www.amazon.com/Sex-Origins-Death-William-Clark/dp/019... He first frames the problem. Firstly pointing out that not all parts of the human body are subject to death. Every cell in your body was alive 180000 years ago when the human race first emerged, and even 3 billion years ago when the first cells really started happening. Every cell in your body and, indeed, you yourself are part of the original cell's lifespan. Second he goes over a lot of experiments that indeed point out the trade-off that God is making here : either you die, or you become a cancerous blob, over time. Not creating the situation where cancer will eventually win is also a no-go, for other reasons. Thirdly, he points out, mathematically, what death is and isn't for a human. It isn't nearly as clear-cut as you might think. He also gives the philosophical reasons why death may indeed not be the end of existence (well it isn't, if you have kids, for obvious reasons, but it may also not be the end of your conscious existence for other reasons). Really, this book will change your thinking on death a lot, and after reading it you will understand that not dieing is something that will come with massive consequences.
- Retric 13y ago
  Your falling pray to survivors bias. If you pick a cell and after each time it reproduces you pick just one of it's decedents as the 'original' then they don't actually last all that long on average. Sure, single celled organisms don't have a built in lifespan but without reproduction anything can wipe them out and you can easily find an average lifespan that's not all that long. As to redefining things so there is only a single cell on the planet that's meaningless. Transcription errors occur all the time to the point where most of the cells in your body don't share the same DNA. Some people even contain a large number of their siblings cells to the point where DNA tests are less reliable than you might think. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_(genetics) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_(genetics) Multi celled organisms are best thought of like a country it's an agreement between a group of similar cells. As such theirs plenty of edge cases where something is both a viable single celled organism and part of an a collective. Specialization is more efficient but not really necessary. As such it's easy to see just how multi celled organisms evolve, but also how cancer is basically inevitable because breaking that agreement does not prevent a cell from being viable in the short term. It also demonstrates that sharing DNA is not really nessiary as for example gut bacteria play a vary useful role dispite sharing any DNA with their host. PS: In the life sciences edge cases can get really strange. As in the closest genetic species to humans is a bunch of single celled organisms not monkey's. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa

nnq 13y ago

Because the heart and circulatory system accumulate damage and fail first in very old age. Yes, the risk of cancer fall a little with old age (or at least the speed of progression - most of the very old that die of heart disease and stroke probably have lots of incipient cancers that would have taken much longer to kill them). This risk never falls to zero or negligible and all anti-aging and regenerative therapies will reverse this - in a system where everything works slower and worse, even cancer works slower. And if you look at that list for example, you see that most of those causes of death are thing that would have been harmless to a person without cardiovascular diseases. Taking some of the examples: the long list of pneumonias is because old people that get stuck in bed because of a stroke or heart failure usually get "aspiration pneumonia" or that the buildup of fluid in lungs due to hart failure leads to a series of complications fatal when coupled with a pneumonia. The only causes from that list that were probably not related to cardiovascular disease, besides the cancers, are probably the 2 kidney failures (...if you don't assume things like renal artery stenosis due to aterosclerosys or aterosclerosys and hypertension related kidney disease). Also, things like "organ failure" are a way of describing the consequences not the cause - there was a cause for that organ failure, just that the pathologist didn't bother looking into it. And unless there is a real suspicion of criminal action, no path exams for the causes of death in old people are really conducted scientifically anywhere in the world.