Majority of Cancers Are Out of Your Control, Says Study

Recently, it was learned that ESPN anchor Stuart Scott had succumbed to his battled against cancer Sunday. He was only 49. He had since been quoted by USA Today as saying that beating the disease, which has been affecting millions of people all over the world, that winning the battle against cancer is down to the way you live.

On that note, can this disease truly be controlled or mitigated?

"Two thirds of cancers could be explained as biological misfortune," Time reported. "Researchers have found that bad luck plays a major role in determining most types of cancer, rather than genetics or risky lifestyle choices such as smoking."

Looks like there's nothing much we can do when it comes to keeping ourselves cancer-free.

The study, which was featured in "Science" journal was done by Johns Hopkins University duo Christian Tomasetti and Bert Vogelstein, who have since found that among the 31 various cancers they have analyzed, "most of them are caused by chance cell mutations rather than any external factors," BBC noted.

"Every single cancer is going to be the result of all three factors: chance, environment, and hereditary," Dr. Tomasetti was quoted by the news source as saying. "There are some tissues, for example bone cancer, where there is very little evidence of any important hereditary or environmental factors."

"We need to focus, even more than before, on secondary prevention. Which is basically early protection," he added.

"Many tissues in the body have stem cells that serve as factories for churning out more cells of the same kind; it's what keeps our skin cells refreshed," Time explained. "This replicative power is the engine that keeps the body going, allowing tissues to replace cells as they die off."

"But it's also the process behind cancer, since cancer is caused by cells that pick up mutations in their DNA when they divide - and stem cells are the only population that copy their DNA and divide to make more cells," the publication added.

The researchers were able to make a stem cell chart of 31 different kinds of tissues in the human body and discovered that "the more stem cells the tissue had, the higher its incidence of cancer over a person's life time on average."

"Having a detailed understanding of both how large a tissue's stem cell population is, as well as how active it is, could be a determining factor in whether it's likely to develop cancer," Time clarified. An example would be a comparison between the brain stem cells and colon stem cells While these two have about the same amount of stem cells, the ones in the colon "divide about 6000 times on average during lifetime, compared to nearly zero for the brain stem cells." This explains why colon cancer rates are about 22 times more than those for brain tumors.

Despite this, current cancer strategies are in no way useless. However, the researchers propose a redirection of cancer-focused strategies, such as looking at the disease based in 2 categories - "genetic bad luck, and those that are due to that unfortunate roll of the genetic dice plus environmental or hereditary factors."

Also, being vigilant about the early symptoms of cancer can also help save lives.

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