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Contradicting Previous Study, Cancer Risk Has Strong Environmental Component (washingtonpost.com)

Posted by Soulskill on from the science-is-hard dept.

The Real Dr John writes: A new study published in the journal Nature provides evidence that intrinsic risk factors contribute only modestly (less than ~10–30% of lifetime risk) to cancer development in humans (abstract). An earlier study had found that the more stem-cell divisions that occurred in a given tissue over a lifetime, the more likely it was to become cancerous. They said that though some cancers clearly had strong outside links – such as liver cancers caused by hepatitis C or lung cancer resulting from smoking – there were others for which the variation was explained mainly by defects in stem-cell division. The new research shows that the correlation between stem-cell division and cancer risk does not distinguish between the effects of internal (genetic) and external (environmental) factors such as chemical toxicity and radiation. They also found that the rates of endogenous mutation accumulation by internal processes are not sufficient to account for the observed cancer risks. The authors conclude that cancer risk is heavily influenced by environmental factors.

4 of 54 comments (clear)

  1. Interesting. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    My mom died of breast cancer. She never really smoke or drank, and ate fairly healthy, at least by the standards of the day. However for a lot of years we lived next door to farmfields that they sprayed with pesticides from airplanes, and it got to the point where we stopped drinking water from our well.

    Makes me wonder if that could be a connection.

    1. Re:Interesting. by dwywit · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I've told my daughter that hairdressing is not a career option. Have you smelled some of the "product" they use? It becomes clearer with a little research - coaltar or benzine-derivative hair dyes. Doing your own hair once in a while - fine. Exposing yourself daily to that stuff *has* to have an effect.

      --
      They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
    2. Re:Interesting. by Locke2005 · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Wanna know the best protection against breast cancer? Popping out a new kid every year. Yeah, environmental factors play a role in cancer, but some of the "controllable" environmental factors may be worse than the cancer risk.

      --
      I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
    3. Re:Interesting. by JoeMerchant · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The point where you probably should have stopped drinking from your well was probably a few months after the first pesticide use started.

      In Florida, there's a huge difference between shallow wells and the deep aquifers. In the 1950s, when my father was growing up, all you had to do was dig a hole 12" deep and most days there would be clean drinking water there. When I was growing up in the 1970s, the shallow water table had dropped from just below the surface to 10 to 20' down, but you wouldn't drink shallow water anymore because it was all so polluted by then. If you were going to drink well water, you wanted to taste the sulfur in it to be sure it was coming from the deep (160'+) aquifer.

      Now, there's talk of "recharging" the deep aquifers with river water - what could possibly go wrong with that scheme?