According to a research published in a in the journal Nature, might be significant for strategizing cancer prevention, research, and public health. The finding was inspired by a research paper which was published in January 2015 in Science. The paper concluded that the majority of the variation in cancer risk among tissues is due to “bad luck,” the research team used the same data to study and analyze what leads to the risk of developing cancer.
The researchers have reported with regard to a great deal of quantitative evidence that proved external environmental risk factors moreover environmental exposures and behaviors contribute to a great extent on the development of approximately 70 to 90 percent of cancers.
“Cancer is caused by mutations in the DNA of cells, which leads to uncontrolled cell growth instead of orderly growth. But the development of cancer is a complex issue, and we as a scientific community need to have solid analytical models to investigate what intrinsic and extrinsic factors cause certain forms of cancer,” says senior author Yusuf Hannun, professor in cancer research and director of the Stony Brook University Cancer Center.
“Many scientists argued against the ‘bad luck’ or ‘random mutation’ theory of cancer but provided no alternative analysis to quantify the contribution of external risk factors,” explains Song Wu, lead author of the paper and assistant professor in the department of applied mathematics and statistics. “Our paper provides an alternative analysis by applying four distinct analytic approaches.”
Dr Emma Smith, of Cancer Research UK, said, “Healthy habits like not smoking, keeping a healthy weight, eating a healthy diet and cutting back on alcohol are not a guarantee against cancer, they do dramatically reduce the risk of developing the disease.”
As researchers have refined their understanding of how cancer begins, a debate that was long abstract has become very real. Scientists can now observe, measure and model the malignant transformation of stem cells and progenitor cells that leads to tumor growth, and show how different kinds of cancers gain a foothold. Then, using epidemiological data of cancer rates in a population, they can reckon how often such events probably occur.
The new research, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, uses some of the same data analyzed by the Johns Hopkins researchers. The researchers found that “extrinsic mutations” drive close to 100% of risk for developing myeloma, lung and thyroid cancers. They found that very high rates of mutations caused by external factors drives risk of bladder, colorectal and uterine cancers.
“This study provides an alternative explanation: that environmental risk factors may produce most mutations during cell division, meaning tissues that produce more cell divisions are more susceptible to external risks,” said Hooker, who was not involved with the latest study.
These results demonstrate that a large proportion of cancer is caused by environmental factors and are preventable if their underlying environmental causes are identified,” said Jian-Min Yuan, an epidemiologist at the University of Pittsburgh’s Cancer Institute who was not involved in the research.
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