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Every Cancer Patient Is One in a Billion

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Re: Every Cancer Patient Is One in a Billion

#31

Post by refurb »

coding123 wrote: post #18

If we really want to cure cancer we should stop polluting our air, water and food. And even if we can't stop we need to find ways to disincentivize making products that require our air and water to be polluted. For food: https://www.basicknowledge101.com/subjects/verticalfarming.h...

Something like 60% of cancers are due to genetics - you inherit a faulty gene or a spontaneous mutation gives you one.

When it comes to environmental causes, tobacco smoke and diet make up the vast majority. Pollution barely registers.

Re: Every Cancer Patient Is One in a Billion

#32

Post by inopinatus »

boaby wrote: post #12
killjoywashere wrote: post #2

Yep, if we really want to cure cancer, we need to go back into the tissue archives and study every single cancer that's ever been diagnosed, at the molecular level, to start getting our heads around what really happened to all those people. 10 million people a year. Every year. For a the last 6-7 decades of chemotherapy. Meanwhile, there's this perverse medicolegal incentive to retain the excised tissue samples for t…

hmm...does this happen in other countries?

I asked the director of a local tissue archive here in Australia. Their specimens go back decades. The regulatory minimum is 10 years for many tissues (more for paediatrics, and indefinitely for clinically significant rarities in molecular genetics) but in practice they hold longer than they have to.

Re: Every Cancer Patient Is One in a Billion

#33

Post by killjoywashere »

breck wrote: post #25
killjoywashere wrote: post #2

Yep, if we really want to cure cancer, we need to go back into the tissue archives and study every single cancer that's ever been diagnosed, at the molecular level, to start getting our heads around what really happened to all those people. 10 million people a year. Every year. For a the last 6-7 decades of chemotherapy. Meanwhile, there's this perverse medicolegal incentive to retain the excised tissue samples for t…

I was unaware of this 10 year rule. Here at UH Cancer Center I know there are teams with samples in the freezer from decades ago. Any links where I can learn more?

You can keep samples as long as you want. The CAP requires accredited labs to keep them 10 years. Attorneys simply want a record retention policy, which creates a natural tension many lab directors respond to by getting rid of the blocks after 10 years. See (1) for the checklist, the specific line item is ANP.12500. In theory things can get kicked to a biorepository, but the standards for a CAP-accredited biorepository are quite high. Running a biorepository that's not accredited raises the specter of questions like "What are you doing with this material, doctor?", so a lot of folks would rather burn our hope for the future than have any possible source of questions about what they're doing.

(1) http://elss.cap.org/elss/ShowProperty?nodePath=/UCMCON/Contr...

Re: Every Cancer Patient Is One in a Billion

#34

Post by killjoywashere »

inopinatus wrote: post #32
boaby wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hmm...does this happen in other countries?

I asked the director of a local tissue archive here in Australia. Their specimens go back decades. The regulatory minimum is 10 years for many tissues (more for paediatrics, and indefinitely for clinically significant rarities in molecular genetics) but in practice they hold longer than they have to.

Yes, there are some really valuable studies out of Australia showing that protein signatures can be retrieved by immunohistochemistry back 80+ years.

Re: Every Cancer Patient Is One in a Billion

#36

Post by JudgeWapner »

leafeewick wrote: post #19

Would open sourcing all cancer research and allowing anyone to contribute and share in the open source community... would that assist in potentially finding a cure/treatment for various cancers or would the profit motive be required for these research to be successful?

how would any random person test their cures? Joe Schmoe thinks fasting for a week and then consuming 100 ml/kg of deionized Jagermeister will stop leukemia dead in its tracks. So which dying cancer patient does he get to test on?

Re: Every Cancer Patient Is One in a Billion

#37

Post by rjf72 »

cannonedhamster wrote: post #29
coding123 wrote: post #18

If we really want to cure cancer we should stop polluting our air, water and food. And even if we can't stop we need to find ways to disincentivize making products that require our air and water to be polluted. For food: https://www.basicknowledge101.com/subjects/verticalfarming.h...

Cancer has always existed regardless of pollution. It's cell mutation, which is part of evolution. You can't fix it by getting rid of pollution. You fix it by making your own immune system recognize it again so that it can not the cell properly. Either that or restore the proper cell death instruction. Cancer deaths have been going down for years, firstly due to less smoking and less salted meat in our diets and now…

There was an interesting study here [1].

They researched the prevalence of cancer in ancient societies using a variety of methods - remains, reporting, etc. The goal was to determine whether the relative lack of cancer in ancient societies was driven by some sort of external factor such as inability to detect cancer in remains, poor reporting, lower life expectancies, etc or rather it was simply because cancer was simply much less common. The evidence available tends to point very much towards the latter which, in turn, suggests that we have created environmental conditions which are driving cancer. The paper references two papers which have pointed to general pollution as a major potential driver there.

Death rates are not a relevant measurement on this topic either since they're heavily confounded by increase in survival rates. You need to look at incident rates, which continue to increase worldwide. Even lung cancer is now on the rise among females.

[1] - https://www.nature.com/articles/nrc2914

Re: Every Cancer Patient Is One in a Billion

#38

Post by DanBC »

refurb wrote: post #31
coding123 wrote: post #18

If we really want to cure cancer we should stop polluting our air, water and food. And even if we can't stop we need to find ways to disincentivize making products that require our air and water to be polluted. For food: https://www.basicknowledge101.com/subjects/verticalfarming.h...

Something like 60% of cancers are due to genetics - you inherit a faulty gene or a spontaneous mutation gives you one. When it comes to environmental causes, tobacco smoke and diet make up the vast majority. Pollution barely registers.

Genetics are important, but when people from one population move to a different region they tend to get the cancers of the new population.

Prostate cancer and breast cancer rates are low in Osaka, but in Japanese people living in Hawaii the rates match the Hawaiian population.

Japanese people living in Japan have high rates of stomach cancer, but those rates drop for Japanese people living in Hawaii.

Re: Every Cancer Patient Is One in a Billion

#39

Post by kochikame »

DanBC wrote: post #38
refurb wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something like 60% of cancers are due to genetics - you inherit a faulty gene or a spontaneous mutation gives you one. When it comes to environmental causes, tobacco smoke and diet make up the vast majority. Pollution barely registers.

Genetics are important, but when people from one population move to a different region they tend to get the cancers of the new population. Prostate cancer and breast cancer rates are low in Osaka, but in Japanese people living in Hawaii the rates match the Hawaiian population. Japanese people living in Japan have high rates of stomach cancer, but those rates drop for Japanese people living in Hawaii.

Yes, the difference in diets and smoking and drinking habits will do that. It's still not pollution in the examples you gave.

Re: Every Cancer Patient Is One in a Billion

#40

Post by Roritharr »

Ironically, living in Germany makes me scared that I won't be able to pay for a therapy by someone like Dr. Nagourney as our governmental health insurance providers are very eccentric when it comes to paying for treatments.

That combined with my high tax-rate and only slightly above average salary means I won't be able to save enough money to afford it to send a loved one to him when it becomes necessary. That is crazy scary to me.

A programmer from close to my area had to publicly raise funds (~350k iirc) to send his 2 year old son to the US for a surgery that saved his life, but which no hospital in Germany dared to perform.[1]

[1] https://www.facebook.com/hilf.david/

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