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65% of Cancers Caused by Bad Luck, Not Genetics or Environment
BarbaraHudson writes The Wall Street Journal and the CBC are reporting that about two-thirds of cancers are caused by random chance. From the WSJ: "The researchers, from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, analyzed published scientific papers to identify the number of stem cells, and the rate of stem-cell division, among 31 tissue types, though not for breast and prostate tissue, which they excluded from the analysis. Then they compared the total number of lifetime stem-cell divisions in each tissue against a person's lifetime risk of developing cancer in that tissue in the U.S." The correlation between these parameters suggests that two-thirds of the difference in cancer risk among various tissue types can be blamed on random, or 'stochastic,' mutations in DNA occurring during stem-cell division, and only one-third on hereditary or environmental factors like smoking, the researchers conclude. 'Thus, the stochastic effects of DNA replication appear to be the major contributor to cancer in humans.'" The CBC reports: "The researchers said on Thursday random DNA mutations accumulating in various parts of the body during ordinary cell division are the prime culprits behind many cancer types. They looked at 31 cancer types and found that 22 of them, including leukemia and pancreatic, bone, testicular, ovarian and brain cancer, could be explained largely by these random mutations — essentially biological bad luck. The other nine types, including colorectal cancer, skin cancer known as basal cell carcinoma and smoking-related lung cancer, were more heavily influenced by heredity and environmental factors like risky behavior or exposure to carcinogens. Overall, they attributed 65 percent of cancer incidence to random mutations in genes that can drive cancer growth."
Cause if I didn't have bad luck I wouldn't have any luck at all!
Capitalist theory requires that everyone is a rational, voluntary actor. The idea that hundreds of millions of people will suffer due to random bad luck renders the whole philosophy inadequate to apply to reality, requiring some sort of mixed economy with bailouts every three decades or so to be workable.
When I was young, I said to my (Russian) uncle, "Didn't communism fail?" He replied, "Yes, communism failed once, and nobody forgets. Capitalism fails every few years, but people quickly forget. We take from this that communism encourages people to learn from their mistakes."
There have been many thousands of studies that have shown the direct mutagenic effects of various carcinogens. This is hardly random. It seems these so-called "scientists" are basically getting paid to create some sort of disclaimer for the various large companies that cause most of the cancer in the world. So their strategy is to obfuscate causation with a bunch of stochastic noise, making cancer causation harder to prove in court.
Here's a link to the actual paper, and a pretty nice editorial from Science (as opposed to CBC).
Who'd have thought that random mutation which turned us from a bunch of slime in a puddle to a race capable of space travel could have a downside!
The human body is a VHS tape being copied over and over and over again. Eventually you get replication errors, one of which could end up being cancerous. It's the price we pay for substantially increasing our lifespan in an extremely short period of time.
The correlation between these parameters suggests that two-thirds of the difference in cancer risk among various tissue types can be blamed on random, or 'stochastic,' mutations in DNA occurring during stem-cell division, and only one-third on hereditary or environmental factors like smoking, the researchers conclude.
The article says,
By “chance” Tomasetti meant the roll of the dice that each cell division represents, leaving aside the influence of deleterious genes or environmental factors such as smoking or exposure to radiation.
The summary says 1/3 has smoking and environmental effects, while the article says the 1/3 doesn't have smoking and environmental effects.
Lately, slashdot summaries have gotten worse and worse and completely change what is being claimed.
You may not know all the variables, you may not understand all the variables, we may not for centuries - but in the grand scheme of things, this universe is most likely deterministic.
Any 'scientist' that claims something is bad 'luck', and NOT environmental - is insane and/or completely lacking in a reasonable understanding of physics and mathematics.
I imagine what they really mean is it's not 'environmental' in any way that we can control at our scale of being, with our current technology.
It only ups your chances 35%.
Either you were in the wrong place at the wrong time, or your cells didn't do the thing because of the genetic lottery. Now we can write everything off as luck, and never take responsibility for anything!
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The headline is shocking when one consider the steep rise of cancer since 1945. If it was luck, then how it could change over time?
But I think the paper could still be a valuable contribution, it is just that this summary ignores the difference between cancer initiation and cancer promotion. Many environmental factors favor existing tumors but do not create them. Hence initiation can be random, while promotion can be environment-induced.
Really /., really?
Sent from my ENIAC
Leave out the top two, by far the most common, and the remaining top two are still predominantly hereditary and or environmental.
From: http://apps.nccd.cdc.gov/uscs/toptencancers.aspx
Top 10 Cancer Sites: 2011, Male and Female, United States Rates per 100,000
1. Prostate 128.3
2. Female Breast 122.0
3. Lung and Bronchus 61.0
4. Colon and Rectum 39.9
then a big drop in numbers before you see ...
5. Corpus and Uterus, NOS 25.4
Me thinks somebody is playing funny buggers with the numbers to get some funding for their particular line of research, while undermining the preventative medicine message at the same time. Evil.
Sure, anyone can get cancer no matter how healthily they live. But modern medicine is so absurdly and willfully blind to the role of nutrition that these conclusions can be largely dismissed by anyone who thinks for themselves.
Oh, hey, trace arsenic cuts breast cancer by FIFTY PERCENT.
What's that? Lithium in drinking water is also associated with a host of benefits? Say it ain't so..
Gee, getting some sunshine / vitamin D can lower risk of pancreatic cancer??
I could go on and on but what would be the point.. supplementation and the like is at best psuedo-science in the eyes of western medicine.. it's much more profitable to engage in "sick care" than to actually equip our bodies with the things it needs at some single percent of the cost.
It could just be bad karma.
Or God.
to make this study possible. enough numbers over enough time, and we'll determine that life causes death.
I always though cancer was ALWAYS a probability as it's something that occurs when your cells randomly mutates as it divides and that mutation happens to be the one that triggers unending growth. While it's a low probability initially, those environmental factors increase how often your cells mutates when it divides. A larger pool of mutations, the more likely one of them is cancer causing. So in a way, it's ALWAYS luck that causes cancer but your lifestyle affects how much luck you need. There is a major difference between a 1% chance of cancer and a 30% chance of cancer (guessing numbers). It's also why cancer is more common as you get older, as more cells has divided over your life, the more mutations you have had.
Now the question is how much environmental factors in general have an effect on us. If it's minute other then some obvious ones like smoking which is only a small subset of the population, then it is indeed likely the based chance of cancer over the entire population causing more cancer then the increase chance of cancer in the subset population. A bit misleading if you think you should go out and smoke since more people die in general from cancer without doing anything since you are comparing the entire population vs a subset of the population.
My cancer got AIDS-infected Ebola. Ebolaids. What are the odds? At the very least, up-vote me for the grammatically-correct hyphenation.
Lifetime risk for cancer death by a smoker is 28 percent compared to 16 percent for a non-smoker. One in three smokers will die of a disease related to smoking, there are other fun diseases such as emphysema which can kill you
I must believe that when people get cancer, it is solely due to a personal failing, like smoking, poor diet, lack of exercise, drug use or obesity. Then I can blame them personally and feel good knowing that it can't happen to me because I don't commit any of those vices. Nor should society, aka me, have to pay for their cancer through higher insurance rates or government taxes because cancer patients are simply reaping what they have sown! The made the wrong heath choices, they should face the consequences.
what creates randomness? it happens to a controlled situation, that isn't entirely random, but is the effect of the universe, and physics, physics are absolutely absolute but humans cannot perceive that everything is working under order of a law, and effect of the environment. the environment, happens to include microwaves, electromagnetism, signals from other particles, so I highly doubt they were able to conclude that the environment doesn't play a much greater role.
they might be saying that their own researchers could not link it to an environmental thing, but I am sure they didn't even have the ability to tell what was really happening in peoples environments, and they probably don't even comprehend what the environment is.
many people continue to deny that microwaves cause cancer for example, but the studies show otherwise, and we know that microwaves have a whole slew of biological health effects that the mass scientific/government community tends to ignore and overlook. cancer is one side effect. tumors are one side effect. alterations in DNA, and cellular function is another side effect. we coat ourselves in microwaves all day long today, from wifi, to cellphones, to radar signals, to wireless signals, it's proven not to be harmless, but most doctors and researchers don't include anything about it in their studies.
they also don't look at the effects of magnetic or electromagnetism at all on people, cells, or DNA. but it's there. causing randomness, causing things to happen that humans don't track.
obamasweapon.com
I recommend you review some of the whitepapers, ie Professor Emeritus Martin Pall, Dr. Paul Dart's, etc's on biological health effects of microwaves for example, to see an area of science where this article falls short. particle physics is another realm that needs to be taken into consideration and molecular biology. oregonstatehospital.net/d/story.html#links
A cool documentary to watch is Resonance: Beings of Frequency.
One reason you don't hear about this is most of the information is classified for national security. So yes, they do deny the public knowledge on the health effects, and most doctors and researchers are clueless twats as a result on it.
OTOH lifetime risk of death (by whatever cause) is 100%
We seem to have accelerated evolution. I suspect that species that have changed little over millions of years probably have little to no cancer risk.
E Proelio Veritas.
The headline is shocking when one consider the steep rise of cancer since 1945. If it was luck, then how it could change over time?
You're forgetting the context in which the study was made.
By assigning most cancer to random chance, they are laying the groundwork for the defense against future lawsuits for negligence and compensation against corporations. Companies will pour money into shouting these results as widely and loudly as possible, it will become a public meme, and the populist mantra will be "I got cancer, but it was just bad luck" for decades.
This is similar to the recent history of the tobacco industry, it took over 50 years to sort that out and the damage hasn't yet settled.
Expect this report to be wildly popular for the next few years.
In the 1970's nearly every Sunday night there were TV movies about people who made something of themselves. Five minutes later, the doctor calls. The rest of the feature plus minutes depict the decline an the camera fades out on a tombstone.
Eventually someone with credibility at his/her deathbed will confess that the risks correlate with success in life, especially at an early age. Consider the moral hazard of such a truth. Every Hindu will point at the West and say, SEE, WE TOLD YOU SO!
[ quality of life ] + [ quantity of life ] = C
This is why transhumanistic medicine exists.
will cause an unexplainable rise in death by violence. There will be no naturalistic explanation for that. Watch for the Stalinist clenched fist raising.
Sure the formation of cancer cells can be random. The body fights off these cancers all the time, no matter how healthy a person may be. The real problem is the toxic conditions that prevent the body from effectively killing off these cancer cells. Doctors prescribe plenty of fluids and bed rest because stressors have a cumulative effect on health. So it's not just a matter of something causing cancer, but something that helps it survive and spread, especially if a substance causes a reaction in a particular organ. Smoking stresses the lungs, for example.
It's 2/3 of all types of cancer, are random. Not 2/3 of all cases of cancer (excluding the most common ones).
bogus math. pointless conclusion.
There are lies
Damn lies
Then there are statistics
Ban chance!
Table-ized A.I.
the conclusion is misleading, to say the least. To say 65% of cancer is caused by random events, when one exludes breast and prostate cancer, and considering that those two combined with pulmonary, skin and colorectal cancer account for greater that 95% of all cancers... well, either misleading or these scientists are morons. The correct interpretation should be "65% of cancer TYPES", most of these accounting for a small percentage ot the total number of cases of cancer. The majority of cancer cases DO have a genetic or environmental etiology.
This is good news. Now we know the underlying cause for 65% of cancers, Big Pharma can start the necessary research on creating a drug to prevent Bad Luck.
I'm sure any viable drug would be a best seller (for those lucky enough to be able to afford it).
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough. - Blake
Of course... if you read it at proper news outlets, they might be able to get a headline with some semblance of truth in it:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/heal...
Most cancer TYPES 'just bad luck'
Most TYPES of cancer can simply be put down to bad luck rather than risk factors such as smoking, a study suggests. 338
They essentially rediscovered evolution--how random mutations result in "luck" against survival in the current environment.
The most telling point in the article was when they said the rate of colon cancer was 4 times the rate of small intestine cancer, and that exactly matches their differing rates of stem cell divisions overall. They did note that certain cancers such as lung cancer and skin cancer had environmental effects and that there were also general inheritance effects from your genes (who'da thunk?).
Cancer is evolution in action (just like every other biological process, whether at the individual cell level, the level of the individual, the level of species, and it also acts against the processes that build biological products such as beaver dams, beehives, and human civilization).
How comes, post WW2 Cancer was almost unheard of. Just Good luck I presume.
Actually study Who Aristotle was and assess the character. Aristotle believe that he deserved to have slaves, that the majority of society should work for _HIS_ benefit, and that manipulation of information was fine if _HE_ benefited from the Sophistry (because he was smarter than everyone else). Aristotle's work in Math is the only thing decent from his complete works. Everything else (or nearly so) was bigotry and bias for self benefit and preservation.
No, no, cancer is a totally modern disease, and nobody ever used to die of it.
They died of humours being unrectified. If only they had taken a drop of Patent Tonic. Such a shame.
While perhaps offensive the point has merit. We know that in Iraq and Afghanistan we have seen exponential increases in birth defects which are linked to the US use of Depleted Uranium. The US _did_ dump dioxin all over Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia including on our own troops. Hell, the US _did_ dump radioactive material on poor neighborhoods in the US during the 1950s. These things were not like leaded paint and gasoline where we may not have known the impact, they were intentionally done knowing the impact.
Nuclear power was a risk that we knew about, my dad was a master plumber who died from a fast mutating cancer that took 3 months to kill him, after finishing his 3rd cooling plant for a 3rd nuclear power plant (there would have been no hard feelings if the insurance company had not cancelled 20+ years of life insurance policy the day he was diagnosed). Cigarettes on the other hand were advertised as "healthy" for over 50 years, and advertised as "cool" and only "kind of bad" for pregnant women for the following 20 years.
In other words, people don't always have your best interests in mind. People work in advertising, Government, and everyplace else as well. Not seeing people for what they are is moronic, contrary to your claim that someone pointing out "people" is that.
I personally haven't found that to be true yet. Maybe your stats are slightly off.
I would have liked to see the study also exclude smoking.
If the number is as high as 65% including the smoking, I would think that after removing that it would be way higher - like on the order of 80% or more.
Luck is a genetic factor and we've been breeding humans for luck.
The tobacco companies made the point for decades that smoking does not cause cancer. As a simple sentence it is true. The proof is that not all smokers get cancer. The better truth is that some cancer in smokers is caused by smoking tobacco. The potential victims of destruction sort of know this by instinct and it is all too easy to think that I am a good person, people like me and god loves me so smoking can not give me cancer. That is a foolish view. but it is very hard to get thropugh that little pychological trick that tobacco addicts use to retain their addiction.
Why we have more and more " random DNA mutations" ?
In Brazil, its easy to answer. PESTICIDES.
Almost all Brazilians has a friend or a family member with a cancer case.
Brazil are the biggest pesticides user of the world.
Even pesticides which are prohibited in Africa and China, are free used in Brazil.
Many Farmers use pesticides in excess and/or in wrong way.
Prohibited pesticides come easily from our fragile border control.
See this movie
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
So now what happens to the anti-smokerism motto that smoking is the #1 cause of preventable death? Nothing, probably. THAT is the kind of science, irrational, abusive, dominating and anti-freedom that many cling to.
We're running a discussion on this topic over on Paul Knoepfler's blog (www.ipscell.com) The link's probably not going to come through, but I really recommend cut and pasting. I have an MSW, and I'm probably the LEAST expert-y person there, so everyone knows their stuff! ;) There are a lot, and I mean a LOT, of methodological issues with that study. It is light years from a done deal, and I personally think there are just too many flaws with study design and data interpretation to take the conclusions seriously yet.
What is this "luck" that causes things to happen when they aren't caused by observable mechanisms? Has anybody ever observed luck In Action? What is the hard evidence of Luck? Saying things are caused by "luck" just glosses over ignorance. Even the outcome of a coin flip, the quintessential "random" event, could be absolutely pre-determined if you know everything about the moment of the flip.
One study of a bunch of other papers does not prove very much. It just indicates their may be a problem with the model being used. It didn't consider families that have gone 3 generations without cancer.
http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/health/new-compound-to-kill-cancer-cells-identified/article6748204.ece
Casteism
Luck is not the cause of anything. Doesn't anyone read Aristotle anymore?
Please post a redaction because there is a lot wrong with the title under which the article is posted, shared and quoted on. Please read this Dutch fact checking article https://decorrespondent.nl/2341/Factcheck-Kanker-is-in-65-procent-van-de-gevallen-gewoon-pech-hebben/178295494828-12f781cc (English G**gle translation is https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=nl&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=https%3A%2F%2Fdecorrespondent.nl%2F2341%2FFactcheck-Kanker-is-in-65-procent-van-de-gevallen-gewoon-pech-hebben%2F178295494828-12f781cc&edit-text=&act=url ) Reasons for giving a redaction extra intention is because facts like this affect people's lifes, cancer prevention and cancer related suffering.