How to drive down your cancer risk
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You know, there's one thing we haven't spoken about in the last few episodes to you.
Now I'm trying to think of something flippant to say and I'm coming up empty, Norman. What haven't we spoken about recently?
I don't think I've mentioned the Mediterranean diet for weeks.
Do you know I have all of my musical instruments next to me today and I'm hoping I can have an excuse to use all of them and I think I might.
Well, yeah, I'm not going to talk about pleiotropy but what's the sound of pleiotropy?
My xylophone.
Wait, I'm going to bring my microphone close. And why there's more than one sound there is that pleiotropy is the idea that one gene can have more than one effect on your body. But that's getting far too technical because that's actually not what we're going to talk about. We might go to the Mediterranean diet on today's What's That Rash?
It's the show where we answer the health questions that everyone is asking.
And this week, our questions are about cancer risk, what we can do to drive down our cancer risk.
Yes, exactly. So today's question comes from Alexandra. Norman has said before, writes Alexandra, that cancer rates are rising. But what can we do about this on a personal level? How can we prevent cancer? Apart from diet, exercise and avoiding chemicals, for women are things like preventive mastectomy, regardless of genetics, a good idea? Are there other things people can do? Would love to hear more on this topic. Well, Alexandra, you're in luck because we are answering your question today. So I want to start with the idea of cancer rates and cancer going up. This is something that you have done so much reporting on recently, Norman. You had a Four Corners film that came out last year. What do we know about cancer rates?
What we know is that overall, if you just average things out across all age groups... cancer rates are not rising. So in other words, your risk of having cancer per thousand of the population according to your age, on average overall, are actually going down. So cancer risk is actually falling. There are two things that are going up. One is numbers, because age is one of the strongest risk factors for cancer. And as there are more people who are older in the population, you're going to get more people developing cancer simply because it's a numbers game there. But your chances at 70 of having cancer are lower than they were maybe two or three decades ago and seem to be continuing to fall with one important caveat, which is the overweight and obesity epidemic, which does increase the risk.
So some people believe that maybe that's tailing off. But overall, rates are coming down, numbers are going up. The other exception are young people. So young people, particularly in the 30s and 40s, what I showed in that Four Corners last year was that about 10 different tumors in young people are increasing. And it seems to be a generational phenomenon. With each generation, they seem to have a higher risk of cancer, which may well follow them through life. So they've been exposed to something earlier. Now, in absolute numbers, it's low. And you can get scary percentages, such as pancreatic cancer going up by 200%. But the actual numbers in young people are still low. But if that continues as these people get older, those numbers will not remain low.
So Young people, rates are rising in some tumors, but the numbers are actually low. So the impact on the overall statistics are not huge, even though it's a major issue, particularly when it comes to colon cancer, which seems to be the main problem, but it occurs in other cancers too.
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