At the same time, everybody seems to accept that the chance of getting cancer in your lifetime has risen to about one in three for men and one in five for women. And nobody knows why.
Because life expectancy has also risen; people who used to be dying of other things are now living long enough that cancer is more common.
Unfortunately the hunch you have just spendt 30 seconds thinking about is sadly incorrect. The increase in life expectancy doesn't account for the increased incidence of cancers. There are other factors at play, which need to be investigated (some that we know: obesity, pollution, cigarettes).
You are looking at cancer deaths, which indeed have gone down from better treatments and better screening. This does not imply less incidence of cancer.
It leads to in increase in cancers detected before the person dies of non-cancer causes.
Situation: person has an almost undetectable cancer. They see a doctor, no cancer detected, later that week they are shot by police at a routine road stop.
We get in our time machine, go back a week and a bit, and supply the doctor with a better detection kit.
Situation 2: person has an almost undetectable cancer. They see a doctor who refers them to a specialist, cancer detected, another notch on the cancer tally board. Later that week they are shot by police at a routine road stop.
Nothing has changed except in the second case there’s another cancer detected. The person is still dead from non-cancer causes, just in one scenario they died as a haver-of-cancer and in the other they didn’t.
Better/earlier detection will necessarily lead to a decrease in cancers that are never detected (which I interpret as an increase in cancers detected before mortality from other causes), otherwise it’s not better/earlier detection.
Agreed, but there are plenty of factors with a better-explained causal mechanism than non-ionizing radiation. Like the three you listed.
My money is on diet and pesticides/preservatives/etc. being another big one. With this, too, there is little official evidence that, say, Roundup, causes cancer, but there is, imo, a stronger lobby against a positive outcome in those studies, and they don't necessarily control for interactions such as Roundup combined with the surfactant that it is typically mixed with that increases cell penetration.
I agree with your comment in principle but the specific example of Roundup is rather weak. Yes, glyphosate is usually studied in isolation rather than as a commercial formulation including surfactants etc., but we have decades’ worth of epidemiological studies showing that proper use of Roundup has, at most, a marginal effect on tumour incidence. Conversely, the most-discussed studies that purport to show Roundup’s carcinogenicity have well-known, glaring methodological flaws (including some that formed the basis of the IARC report). The case of Roundup is made more complicated by the fact that Monsanto/Bayer has been caught red-handed skewing the publication record without disclosure of conflict of interest, and lobbying scientific journals. But the same is true for the opposition: for instance, the now-retracted 2012 Séralini study also failed to disclose the authors’ conflict of interest. And beyond improper publication practices (which, yes, is serious), there’s no evidence that Monsanto/Bayer actually falsified information.
In sum, I’d rank the risk of Roundup being carcinogenic on roughly the same level as that of 5G: possible but unlikely, given the best available evidence.
Ok, fair enough. I have enough other reasons to be against roundup without needing to cling to believing it's carcinogenic. Thanks!
For the record, the other reasons are to do with the larger ecological impact of roundup-based practices, such as harm to soil fungi and bacteria, and collateral damage from runoff or wind. Plus, there were some studies finding it may cause harm to intestinal lining and such, even if it's not actually a carcinogen.
Agroindustrial farming practices have led to most of our produce in stores becoming more caloric but less nutritionally dense. Interesting idea that perhaps our food plants are becoming more "obese-yet-malnourished" and this change in food plants could be at the root of a number of health risks.
I checked this for you, and what appears to be the best meta study I could find shows that the only correlation found was that long sleep duration increases the risk of one type of cancer:
The present meta-analysis suggested that neither short nor long sleep duration was significantly associated with risk of cancer, although long sleep duration increased risk of with colorectal cancer.
"After just one night of only four or five hours’ sleep," Walker tells The Guardian, "your natural killer cells—the ones that attack the cancer cells that appear in your body every day—drop by 70%." Sleep deprivation has such serious outcomes that "the World Health Organisation has classed any form of night-time shift work as a probable carcinogen."
^Matthew Walker, presumably the 70% drop is from work at his Berkeley lab
Cigarette smoking has fallen a LOT in the US in the past few decades, though there does seem to be a resurgence lately with "vaping".
Pollution is lower too (again, in the US): cars used to pollute a LOT more. Smog used to be far, far worse in the LA area decades ago, so even with more people and more cars, pollution is lower, particularly localized pollution that affects people more. Of course, global warming pollution is certainly higher, but that isn't localized and shouldn't have any effect on you (it's just CO2).
Well, if you could point me to a good scientific study that makes a link between higher life expectancy and cancer, I'd be inclined to believe it. Until then, I think the cancer incidence rise is shocking, and can't be explained by rise in life expectancy alone.
cancer incidence rising strongly correlates with our ability to detect as well as the push to look for it.
I also believe many of the cancers we successfully treat would be non issues if left alone. (all the young women who found lumps and become breast cancer survivors)
Before we go any further, are you a scientist or a doctor? You're arguing on a thread where there are a bunch of scientists who have fairly deep knowledge in this area (it's still an area that a lot of people who come from external areas, like physics, struggle with frequently).
Cancer rates are strongly driven by age- cancer incidence increases exponentially as people age (stochastically, of course).
from where does this increase in cancer probability statistic come from? anyone have a link to a paper? tried googling but found nothing reliable sadly
A big confounder in studies based on diagnosis numbers is that you can confuse better diagnosis with higher incidence, and earlier diagnosis with longer survival. No room for confusion with Death though, it's very cut and dried.
Suppose that today the average person tells their doctor about a symptom of Example Cancer (which is incurable) six months before it kills them. 1 million people per year in Standard Country die of Example Cancer, with an average of six months between diagnosis and death.
Now, let's imagine I invent a machine, it can scan seemingly healthy people and tell them if they've got Example Cancer on average 12 months earlier. Nothing changed in terms of whether people get Example Cancer, it's still incurable, but now we've improved time between Diagnosis and Death by 200% but even scarier the incidence of Example Cancer, the number of people who know they have it, has also increased by 200%. It's an epidemic!
That machine is pretty unrealistic. A more realistic machine also gives false positives for Example Cancer. Now the number of people living with Example Cancer has increased by 500% but good news, most of those people don't die of it, because they had what medics would call "Sub-clinical incidence" meaning, sure, you had the disease but it didn't actually affect your life so who cares?
A big confounding factor in counting incidence based on cancer deaths would be improved treatment. Whether by medical advances or simple earlier diagnosis having better cure rates.
Because life expectancy has also risen; people who used to be dying of other things are now living long enough that cancer is more common.