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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."
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."
I think you missed the part about 65% and not "all" cancers, and some cancers are highly affected by carcinogens and some are less based on biases created in modern living.
So, you're saying you're a lawyer?
Here's a link to the actual paper, and a pretty nice editorial from Science (as opposed to CBC).
Oh of course...how dare this research pit itself against your AC confirmation bias.,
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
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.
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
Well... I think the article is missing something. The summary certainly is.
What the article says (somewhat simplified) is that there's a strong positive correlation between the rate of cell division, and cancer. If random mutations cause cancerous cells, it will be worse or spread faster in rapidly multiplying ones. Makes sense.
Now... What if you add carcinogens in there that make each cell division more likely to fail in a way that causes cancer? The same correlation. So it really doesn't say all that much about the influence of carcinogens. The slope of the correlation will change, but the data will remain roughly the same. Exception: if some carcinogen specifically targets some tissues, those points will be lifted up above the correlation on their graph.
Oh please, there are so many billions of people living wildly different life styles and there's a considerable incidence of cancer all of the world. And we got cases of cancer that are 3000 year old, it's not like it showed up recently. And if you correct for increased lifespan there's no explosion in cancer, we only have a lot more old people whose cell reproduction system has had longer to develop a critical fault. Obesity is a contributing factor to heart problem, there's still normal weight/underweight people with heart problems. I don't know any rational basis to assume the default is almost no cancer and it all must be part of some conspiracy, but apparently the tin foil hatters are modding you up. I guess they can mix the cancer-giving stuff into the chemtrails...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
This study says that about 35% of all cancer is caused by carcinogens, so in fact it confirms that carcinogens cause a significant proportion of cancer.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
to make this study possible. enough numbers over enough time, and we'll determine that life causes death.
Saying that the majority of head injuries are caused by vehicles and car accidents doesn't contradict the strong evidence that shooting someone in the head causes head injury. Just because there are things that can directly cause a problem doesn't mean that they are the only source of those problems, nor necessarily that they even cause the majority of problems. There are some things that increase your risk of cancers, and some substances that with enough exposure can just about guarantee you will get cancer, but that doesn't mean the vast majority of people are exposed to those substances in large enough quantities. This doesn't remove any responsibility from companies or anyone else to prevent exposure to carcinogens. And it was already known that there were many possible causes of any given person's cancer, and it can be difficult to prove a particular source caused it.
There's a big difference between saying "most cancers are caused by random chance" and saying "there aren't specific substances that cause cancer."
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
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.
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.
Agreed. It's mostly bullshit reporting too. 65% of cancers are not caused by "bad luck". They are caused by yet unknown reasons. Unknown reasons is not "bad luck". Bad luck is getting hit by a meteor.
http://www.medscape.com/viewar...
In the United States, 1 in 3 cancer deaths is related to obesity, poor nutrition, or physical inactivity, and the problem will only increase as more countries and regions adopt the diet and lifestyles of more economically developed economies.
Nearly 20% of the world's adult population smokes, and worldwide tobacco is killing around 6 million people each year from a variety of smoking-related diseases, the report estimates.
Precise figures are given for the year 2000, when 4.38 million premature deaths globally were attributed to smoking, with causes listed as cardiovascular disease
Still under-recognized, and not acted on, is the association between drinking alcohol and cancer.
The IACR has labeled alcoholic beverages as "carcinogenic to humans" (and placed them in group 1, alongside ultraviolet light and chronic infection with hepatitis B). This classification was first made in 1988, and then confirmed in 2007 and 2010.
http://www.livestrong.com/arti...
33% is from obesity, and inactivity. 20% of the population is succeptible to smoking related cancers. In the US that is 60m people and 200k got cancer from it. And 1.6m total cancers a year. So, 12% of all cancers are tobacco.
http://seer.cancer.gov/statfac...
So, WTF? 100% - 33% - 12% = 55% remaining
so *how* do you even get to 65% with just tobacco and obesity/inactivity accounting for 55% already? We haven't even accounted for external chemical factors like record usage of RoundUp alone, never mind the rest of the crap.
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
You know what causes bullshit reporting in part? Not taking the time to read or understand what you're summarizing. And you know what you did along with several other comments here? Not take the time to read or understand what you're summarizing, because there is a big difference between cancer death rates and cancer rates in general, not to mention assuming there is no overlap in cancer deaths attributed to obesity and smoking, considering lack of physical activity is detrimental to lung health too when combined with other stresses.
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.
I think you missed the part about 65% and not "all" cancers, and some cancers are highly affected by carcinogens and some are less based on biases created in modern living.
Still, these factors play into each other. Your lifestyle and environment influence how vulnerable you are to bad luck - I have heard it said that we all have cancer all the time, but our immune system normally manages to kill off the cancerous cells; external factors can weaken our immune system to the extent that some cancer cells may survive.
The way I understand this new research is that of the cancerous mutations that survive long enough to manifest themselves as a noticeable disease, 65% are caused by mutations with unknown causes. Random simply means that we don't know the cause, as opposed to the big classes of known causes: environment, lifestyle and inheritance. And I think the big surprise is still that so large a proportion (35%) of cancers are caused by these things. IOW, over a third of cancers are known to be potentially preventable - since, when we know the cause, we may be able to do something about it.
That's all pretty muddy thinking. Suppose that all cancers are decided by a roll of a set of dice, and carcinogens and genetics merely control how many black and green faces there are on the dice. Then a cancer is never just a matter of luck or carcinogens but always both. But it's still possible to conclude that there would be 35% less cancers if we kept the carcinogens down. Or put differently, we shouldn't hope to be able to cut in half the number of cancers by just removing carcinogens, because it just doesn't have enough impact. So you have a potentially very valuable research result, but it gets interpreted in a nonsensical manner.
Agreed. It's mostly bullshit reporting too. 65% of cancers are not caused by "bad luck". They are caused by yet unknown reasons. Unknown reasons is not "bad luck". Bad luck is getting hit by a meteor.
"Unknown reasons" _is_ bad luck. If there are things that I should avoid and could avoid to increase my chances of being cancer free, but nobody knows about it, then it is just bad luck if I encounter these things. If there are things that I know I should avoid but I can't avoid, that's also bad luck. Being hit by a meteor is just an extreme case of the second kind of "bad luck"; it's something I know I should avoid but I can't.
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
Your post seems to have an underlying message of blame.
That's because you're poor at making accurate assumptions. Although, let's face it, many cancer patients have only themselves to blame, due to their lifestyle. Others clearly had cancer done to them, like Viet Nam. And our soldiers there too, but a whole country being sprayed with dioxin is more serious than just some people we sent there for economic reasons. And then there's the immense middle ground, where the average person's immune system and thus resistance to everything, not just cancer, is impaired by the government-sponsored diet. Do those people actually get cancer because of "bad luck"? Or is it because of something someone did to them?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Epidemiology is a science. Deal with it.
Any time you have two people with slightly different goals, politics happens. Deal with it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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).
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.
He did but the original post was from a member of the First Church of the Organic loving skeptic.
Anything that violates that dogma is a danger to them because they are sure that they are rational so all of their beliefs are rational and anything that endangers their beliefs must be bad science.
It is funny because one of the worst risks is from the all natural organic tobacco plant. And no modern tobacco is not any more dangerous than what people smoked in 1600s.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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?...
Buy now before the FDA and Big Pharma catch on!!!
XDInd
Gauss also says that quantum mechanics is bollocks and we haven't found the true cause of non-determinism yet. But also there he is wrong.
Yes, but actually assigning instances of a deadly disease to bad luck rather than bad choices goes against the puritan heart of America, where everybody gets what they deserve, and no person that is well off should feel inclined to share any of the product of good luck with anyone else. Because, you know, they obviously made good choices, no bad ones. No luck involved.
That hardware bug still has a cause and it's not inherent in all hardware designs. Random always means "we don't understand the system well enough to say why it's happening". When they figure out the cause of those "random" cancer causing events they could very well be caused by the environment or unknown genetic defects.
Think globally but act within local variable scope.
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.
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?