10 Golden Rules for Cancer Prevention

Almost half of all scientific research in medicine concerns cancer. Efforts to understand this group of diseases, with up to a thousand types including subgroups, have a history spanning thousands of years . However, what we have learned in the past 200 years has revealed what this disease really is. As knowledge increases, the proportions of people successfully treated for cancer and protected from it increase daily. Nevertheless, cancer will exist as long as life exists. Scientific progress is difficult to predict, but we believe cancers will eventually become a fully treatable group of diseases.

We now know that cancer is a genetic disease at the cellular level. Here, genetic does not mean that all cancers are hereditary , but that for a cell to become cancerous its genetic structure, namely its DNA, must accumulate damage. What damages our DNA in ways that push it toward cancer? If we learn cancer’s causes, we can prevent at least half of cancers!

Cancer is also a disease of aging. Aging cells, the declining and individually variable capacity of DNA repair systems , weakening immunity with age and the cumulative effects of lifelong exposure to carcinogens mean cancers mostly occur in older age. Nevertheless, cancers are substantially preventable. A range of environmental factors, examined in detail below, have proven close links to cancer development, and environmental factors are the easiest cancer causes to prevent.

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