Page 46 - August 2016 Life In Naples Magazine
P. 46
DOCTOR’S CORNER
CANCER
causes and prevention
by Allen Weiss, MD, MBA, FACP, FACR Certainly there is evidence that various parts of the human
President and CEO, NCH Healthcare System body have widely different rates of developing cancer. But there
is also strong epidemiological evidence that lifestyle factors are
C ancer is the second leading cause of death in America, important in cancer development. Most likely, just as cancer is
with 1.6 million new cancer cases and 600,000 deaths a combination of diseases, there are combinations of causes—
from cancer predicted to occur in 2016. These statistics ranging from bad luck due to excessive cell turnover to bad
are from “A Cancer Journal for Clinicians” which also identified lifestyle choices.
a decrease in cancer mortality of nearly 18 percent from 1969
to 2013. Bad luck, namely random mutations during stem cell division,
is not preventable at the present time. Earlier detection and
Cancer is most likely a combination of diseases with many treatment helps ameliorate the effects of bad luck and certainly
different causes. The cause and cure remain frustratingly the medical profession is working diligently to accelerate early
elusive, with recent suggestions that random mutations during diagnosis and broaden effective treatment.
stem cell divisions are the major contributor to human cancer.
Science magazine this past January suggested that tissues in the This past spring another influential study entitled, “Preventable
human body that are more prone to develop cancer are much Incidence and Mortality of Carcinoma Associated With Lifestyle
more likely to have a far higher total number of divisions of Factors Among White Adults in the United States,” suggested that
the normal self-renewing cells. This higher rate of turnover roughly half of all cancer deaths could be avoided by doing four
increases the chances of something going wrong in the control things.(The reason for “white adults”is that this was a retrospective
of the reproduction mechanism with the subsequent inability study combining lifestyle data from the Nurses’ Health Study
to turn off the reproduction of cells, namely cancer. The article and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study and there were
goes on to suggest that only a third of the variation in cancer not enough others to reach statistical significance.) Nonetheless,
risk among tissues is attributable to environmental factors or
inherited factors.
46 Life in Naples | August • September • October 2016
