Almost Half of Cancer Deaths Globally Are Attributable To Preventable Risk Factors, New Study Suggests (cnn.com) 84
Globally, nearly half of deaths due to cancer can be attributable to preventable risk factors, including the three leading risks of: smoking, drinking too much alcohol or having a high body mass index, a new paper suggests. CNN reports: The research, published Thursday in the journal The Lancet, finds that 44.4% of all cancer deaths and 42% of healthy years lost could be attributable to preventable risk factors in 2019. "To our knowledge, this study represents the largest effort to date to determine the global burden of cancer attributable to risk factors, and it contributes to a growing body of evidence aimed at estimating the risk-attributable burden for specific cancers nationally, internationally, and globally," Dr. Chris Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, and his colleagues wrote in the study.
The paper, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, analyzed the relationship between risk factors and cancer, the second leading cause of death worldwide, using data from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation's Global Burden of Disease project. The project collects and analyzes global data on deaths and disability. Murray and his colleagues zeroed in on cancer deaths and disability from 2010 to 2019 across 204 countries, examining 23 cancer types and 34 risk factors. The leading cancers in terms of risk-attributable deaths globally in 2019 was tracheal, bronchus and lung cancer for both men and women, the researchers found. The data also showed that risk-attributable cancer deaths are on the rise, increasing worldwide by 20.4% from 2010 to 2019. Globally, in 2019, the leading five regions in terms of risk-attributable death rates were central Europe, east Asia, North America, southern Latin America and western Europe.
The paper, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, analyzed the relationship between risk factors and cancer, the second leading cause of death worldwide, using data from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation's Global Burden of Disease project. The project collects and analyzes global data on deaths and disability. Murray and his colleagues zeroed in on cancer deaths and disability from 2010 to 2019 across 204 countries, examining 23 cancer types and 34 risk factors. The leading cancers in terms of risk-attributable deaths globally in 2019 was tracheal, bronchus and lung cancer for both men and women, the researchers found. The data also showed that risk-attributable cancer deaths are on the rise, increasing worldwide by 20.4% from 2010 to 2019. Globally, in 2019, the leading five regions in terms of risk-attributable death rates were central Europe, east Asia, North America, southern Latin America and western Europe.
Meat for the health insurance industry (Score:1)
Re:Meat for the health insurance industry (Score:5, Interesting)
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What do you have as fulfillment for life?
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Re: Meat for the health insurance industry (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: Meat for the health insurance industry (Score:2)
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Cancer after all, is one form of life, but my sympathies lay elsewhere.
You either die together with the cancer or the cancer dies by itself.
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But some of the things are just so easy. For example, ~5% of all cancers - and about ~9% in women - are due to HPV. Just vaccinate against HPV and your odds drop to nearly zero. Takes almost no time. Depending on where you are, usually covered for children and available to adults at-cost.
I don't think most adults even know it's an option. Now of course, by the time you're an adult you've probably gotten at least one type of HPV already, possibly several - plus you have fewer years for it to lead to can
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Of course there is one group who is against the HPV vaccine.
Re: Meat for the health insurance industry (Score:2)
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I haven't had any health care or insurance for a while, but back when I did I asked for the HPV vaccine and was denied on the basis that I was a man and didn't need it. Giving it to men means they aren't spreading it to women, but I guess that logic escaped health care professionals at the time. These days it's normal for men to get it, especially young men. I hate being right all the time.
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The HPV vaccine was originally offered to women only because women get considerably greater benefit from it. Once large-scale safety was characterized, it was offered to men as well.
Vaccines are all about risk/benefit. Indirect benefits like you mention are real, but they're considerably harder to sell. Did you not notice a certain amount of excitement over that issue in the last year and a half?
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This was well into the distribution, when men were generally starting to get it, but I was in the sticks and I guess they hadn't gotten the memo yet.
Anyway, I find it dismaying when people who want to be vaccinated can't get vaccinated, in general. If there's anything we should be promoting medically...
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Unfortunately we live in a world where a significant number of people were sentenced to die horribly because some other people thought the HPV vaccine infringed on their all-loving imaginary friend's right to sentence people to die horribly.
Dismaying indeed.
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About 1% of cancers in men are due to HPV. Even ignoring the anti-transmission benefits, a simple low-risk way to reduce your lifetime cancer risk by 1% is still surely worthwhile to you, no?
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At least in civilized places, the HPV vaccine is currently recommended for both men and women. You will notice from my post and the thread it is attached to that I was talking about the first year or two the vaccine was available. That is:
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I don't think most adults even know it's an option.
I didn't. Last time I checked, it wasn't an option. Thanks.
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That is why in a sane society, you _cannot_ be denied coverage.
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a sane society
In my neck of the woods, we've been losing that battle for almost 6 years now.
Can't be (Score:2, Funny)
Dr. Rush Limbaugh MD, PhD, GED told me that smoking can't possibly cause cancer and the warnings are just a government conspiracy.
Safety first (Score:2)
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If you live safety-first life without dangers, vices and excitements, there is a good chance you will die a healthy man.
Slightly more chance you die a healthy woman [google.com]
Might not be worth the risk.
complete fail (Score:2)
Was meant to be because women live longer.
Re: complete fail (Score:2)
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The sad part is that you're far more likely to die a sick, massively depressed individual. Mouse utopia applies to all mammals. You can see this in children raised in "safety first" households who go on to take insane, often borderline suicidal risks the moment they get out of those households.
Interestingly this applies to almost everything. Even cleanliness of environment. One of the most interesting studies on the topic I've looked at is the one from a few years ago, when cleanliness among people of simil
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If you live safety-first life without dangers, vices and excitements, there is a good chance you will die a healthy man.
Even better, get castrated and die an old eunuch. Possession of testicles is a bigger health risk than drinking alcohol.
https://edition.cnn.com/2012/0... [cnn.com]
Re:Safety first (Score:5, Informative)
If you live safety-first life without dangers, vices and excitements, there is a good chance you will die a healthy man.
This doesn't mean you have to live a boring life. I didn't read the whole paper but there's a graph with main risk factors: https://els-jbs-prod-cdn.jbs.e... [elsevierhealth.com]
The main ones seem to be: tobacco, alcohol use, dietary risk, air pollution, high body-mass, unsafe sex.
Yeah I'm sure a smoker and a drinker will tell you it's enjoyable, but even if it is, personally I don't see any of these as key to having a fun life. Plenty of fun stuff you can do instead.
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> Yeah I'm sure a smoker and a drinker will tell you it's enjoyable, but even if it is, personally I don't see any of these as key to having a fun life. Plenty of fun stuff you can do instead.
I think that's the point, for you personally the enjoyment is not worth the harm, but value is subjective, other people might choose differently. No one is stopping you from making that decision, and you shouldn't stop others for deciding the opposite.
People should be informed of the dangers, but ultimately it shoul
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I think that's the point, for you personally the enjoyment is not worth the harm, but value is subjective, other people might choose differently. No one is stopping you from making that decision, and you shouldn't stop others for deciding the opposite.
There's a pretty good argument that since the society as a whole ends up bearing the cost of these consequences, then we absolutely should ban or at least discourage such behaviors.
Personally I couldn't care less if you kill yourself with lung cancer, that wasn't the point of my post. Just that avoiding some high-risk behaviors doesn't mean living a meaningless, boring life.
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> There's a pretty good argument that since the society as a whole ends up bearing the cost of these consequences, then we absolutely should ban or at least discourage such behaviors.
And there are even better arguments against it.
People should pay for the costs of their negative externalities, not for internalities, and not for using services provided because of positive externalities.
> Just that avoiding some high-risk behaviors doesn't mean living a meaningless, boring life.
It really depends on the
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Do smokers/drinkers really like being addicted? (Score:3)
Yeah I'm sure a smoker and a drinker will tell you it's enjoyable, but even if it is, personally I don't see any of these as key to having a fun life. Plenty of fun stuff you can do instead.
I know many alcoholics and chain smokers. None of them are happy. It's an addiction. People who enjoy smoking and drinking can do so in moderation. Getting drunk with your friends is fun (not for me personally, but for others who enjoy that). Drinking to cope with depression is not fun. They're not happy, they're mentally ill and addicted. They want to quit, but just can't.
The same applies to the obese. I know many fat people, including most of my family. No one is happy to be fat and less than
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If you live safety-first life without dangers, vices and excitements, there is a good chance you will die a healthy man.
The healtiest person in the graveyard!
Very selective set of proposed causes (Score:2, Insightful)
"Globally, nearly half of deaths due to cancer can be attributable to preventable risk factors, including the three leading risks of: smoking, drinking too much alcohol or having a high body mass index, a new paper suggests".
Smoking seems to make a significant difference, although (to take just one example) Bertrand Russell smoked like a chimney and drank heavily - and died at 97. The same applied to Winston Churchill who, however, only lived to 89. Perhaps the difference of 8 years was due to Churchill bei
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Re: Very selective set of proposed causes (Score:5, Informative)
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The vast majority of people complaining about BMI are overweight and don't understand statistics.
Thing is regardless of dimensionality, it works over the range of human sizes (also we don't scale linearly).
You can do the maths, and people have. You can takethe prediction of BMI, and a more accurate measurement, marginalize out over all other variables and look at the prediction accuracy. For read-only randomly selected members of the population, if it says you are obese, it's correct for 95% of men and 99%
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Trying to figure out what you left out of the above. "...bet very much against it"?
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almost: my auto confuse corrected "bet" to "very". They're nearly identical swipe patterns.
But yeah, I wouldn't bet very much against it :)
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Deaths from alcohol abuse, drug abuse, obesity, and suicide have been called "deaths of despair", people that are living a hard life and looking for ways to ease the pain. This isn't from poverty necessarily because people lived happy lives in the past with far less wealth than we have today. Poverty does contribute because if these people can't afford what they believe will solve their problems then they indulge in what they can afford. Food is cheap, as are alcohol and cigarettes.
I agree that BMI has b
Some of the biggest risks are relatively unknown. (Score:1)
Wash your hands after you poop. Don't cook indoors.
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Almost half of all automobile accident deaths are contributed to preventable stupidity.
That's actually a myth. You can't prevent Americans from being stupid. It's in The Constitution or something.
Direct and indirect causes (Score:5, Interesting)
I personally believe that the highest contributing health factor is stress, especially in the long term.
First, it affects the body's health directly: it weakens the immune system, thus making you more susceptible to catching germs, viruses and cancer.
It affects people getting overweight, both directly by stress hormones telling the cells to store energy, and indirectly by eating more (comfort, binge) because eating carbs releases serotonin which makes people feel better.
People medicate against stress by smoking.
Next they try to avoid stress by instead engaging more in activities that had made them feel good, such as going out for drinks more, and engage in more sex.
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I personally believe that the highest contributing health factor is stress, especially in the long term.
My intuition agrees with your intuition. There is also some evidence for it: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]
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Stress could have something to do with it. Maybe a contributing factor. Throughout my career I've been put under crushing stress. Often it was by incompetent people that wanted to get rid of the competent people. I'm very good at what I do so I was often a target. At the age of 30 I was under so much stress my blood pressure was like English voltage. 250/220. Maybe higher. I was out of that job by that Friday. Otherwise I wouldn't be here. That was almost 30 years ago.
I think it has more to do with the immu
forgot compromised immunity (Score:1)
So many questions... (Score:1)
Not exactly groundbreaking to have the outcome be "Smoking will kill you": more that it quantifies the numbers a little better, and that they're a little higher than last time.
I'm at a loss as to how *unsafe sex* is related to cancer at all, let alone the #2 risk factor in DALY. I mean, I don't follow medicine too attentively, but contagious cancer? That seems like something I'd have heard of.
Unless by "unsafe sex" they mean "while skydiving, because fkit, I have terminal cancer", I'm having a really hard t
Re: So many questions... (Score:4, Informative)
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Hepatitis can also cause liver cancer and doesn't care what sex you are. HIV can too.
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Men do get cancer from HPV. Check it out:
https://www.cdc.gov/hpv/parent... [cdc.gov]
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You know it would have taken less time to type a short query into the Google machine than go on a long monologue.
HPV is a virus which can be transmitted sexually, that causes cancer.
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You're right, it would have - but it seemed so absurd that it didn't even cross my mind to try! While I'm happy to have given you a chance to be a condescending ass about it, "can sex cause cancer?" isn't the sort of thing you expect anyone to ever consider might have a *very* unintuitive answer. :)
You did answer my question though, so now I'm better informed, so thank you for that.
Given the crusades we've seen again sexual freedom for, you know, the last several thousand years or so, I tend to be fairly di
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Fair point, fair point, I apologize. I was being a dickhead.
hypocrisy is the greatest luxury (Score:2)
...was released in an attempt to distract from the fact that The Gates Foundation makes investments that drive up cancer rates [latimes.com] with unavoidable pollution.
Yep, that's a really old article. Still applies.
Ah - statistics (Score:1)
And they seem to forget one very important thing. Not one of us gets out of here alive. We die as surely as we exist.
So let's say a person eliminates all of the factors indicated. Never drinks, never smokes, keeps as slim as possible and exercises vigorously
Why - they are gonna die from something else. Probably dementia related. Rotting away in a nursing home, drug
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Yeah cancer sure is a quick way to go.
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Yeah cancer sure is a quick way to go.
Compared to the alternative these people inadvertently invoke, it is.
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You assume you'll die relatively spritely at 75 instead of in an advanced state of decline at 85 when the reality tends to be that unless you contract something particularly aggressive, your lifestyle results in the decline beginning at 65. We are discovering more and more that things we considered just part of getting old actually have root causes in something mostly avoidable. Like how stomach ulcers turned out to be caused by bacteria we often picked up in early life due to playing in dirt. And stomach c
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You assume you'll die relatively spritely at 75 instead of in an advanced state of decline at 85 when the reality tends to be that unless you contract something particularly aggressive, your lifestyle results in the decline beginning at 65. We are discovering more and more that things we considered just part of getting old actually have root causes in something mostly avoidable. Like how stomach ulcers turned out to be caused by bacteria we often picked up in early life due to playing in dirt. And stomach cancers in turn caused by treating stomach ulcers instead of curing the bacteria causing them.
It is not a binary situation. That reducing or eliminating a cause of death increases the chances of death from another cause is pretty hard to debate. And it doesn't mean that we avoid treating other things, like your mentioned ulcers or HPV.
I assume nothing, merely quote facts. Or are you one of the modern's who assume that humanity is on the very cusp of immortality? Just joking...
30 years ago every "old person" I knew was deaf, these days I don't see nearly so many hearing aids.
I am hard of hearing, and many people I am around are also - a lot of military Veterans who spent a lot of time in really
Where do crickets fit in? (Score:2)
Indeed (Score:2)
Like all the accidents as well.
Should healthy people have to subsidize unhealthy? (Score:2)
If someone chooses to live an unhealthy or risky lifestyle, whatever blows your hair back. But don't expect me to pay for the consequences of that lifestyle.
Well-intentioned carcinogens (Score:2)
It will be a long time before we figure out how many benzene-induced cancers result from this
So what? (Score:1)
Ok, so if everyone were as rich as Bill, there would be a lot less cancer. Wait, but you have to die from something. Ok, there would be the same amount of cancer, but people would die older. ...Assuming you even believe the "study," whose authors of course have an ax to grind.
In other news ... (Score:2)
I prefer to live life my way and enjoy the things it offers instead of living in a bubble and avoiding all risks.
Because that's what these are