Increase the odds
Behavior shifts cut cancer risk
Acousin of mine is a retired head football coach from a large two-year college in California. Whenever we are having a visit or talking on the phone, it doesn’t take long for us to talk football. Well, mostly he talks, and I listen and learn.
In our younger days, he was one of the fittest men I ever knew. When he was 42 years old, he bench-pressed 410 pounds. That kind of discipline extended to his coaching. He believed that thorough preparation and practice would put a team in its strongest position to win. But he also believes in, and seems to delight in, the luck of the game.
As he told me one time, the shape of a football guarantees unpredictability. A fumbled football will bounce anywhere it wants to, and generally not where the closest player thinks it will go. A lucky bounce or two, and you’re in the playoffs. An unlucky bounce and you’re on a sad bus heading home.
Most of us think about the threat of cancer like we do the randomness of a bouncing football. What bad luck should it happen to me, but there’s not much I can do to prevent the unpreventable.
In America, 2017 will have brought approximately 1.6 million new diagnoses of cancer, and 600,000 cancer deaths. Last month the medical publication CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians looked at what it called “potentially modifiable risk factors” for cancer in adults 30 years of age and older. In other words, are there things we can do to avoid some cancers, and how significant a difference would result from doing those things? Are there actions we can take that might put us in the best position to win a fight for healthy longevity, and reduce the number of new cancer diagnoses?
It turns out that there are things we can do and behaviors we can change that significantly reduce our risks of getting cancer. “Modifiable” means we can modify certain behaviors, and if we do, there can be reduction in our risk of getting certain cancers.
This study estimates in adults over the age of 30 that 42 percent of the 1.6 million cancers could have been prevented, and 45.1 percent of the deaths could have been avoided. Obviously not all are prevented, but 265,000 fewer cancer deaths each year would be a dramatic improvement.
So what are some of these “modifiable risk factors”?
Smoking is the most significant. For men, a third of cancer deaths could have been prevented if smoking had been avoided, and close to another 1 percent if secondhand smoke is avoided. For women, smoking is also by far the greatest modifiable risk factor. The study did not look at oral forms like chewing tobacco, but they should also be avoided.
The next most significant is excess body weight. Approximately 6.5 percent of cancer deaths could have been avoided if weight had been in a normal range. Losing weight is challenging. Making the effort not to add on additional weight and working with our children so they don’t have weight challenges may pay off in years to come.
Several dietary factors add to the cancer risk. Alcohol consumption, consumption of processed meats and red meat, and low intake of fruits, vegetables and fiber all add to the risk of cancer and cancer deaths. And it’s not just healthful dietary factors that help. Healthy physical activity helps prevent cancers and cancer deaths.
Finally, there are infections that increase risk for cancer. Some can be prevented by vaccine, like Human Papillomavirus and Hepatitis B, and others like HIV and Hepatitis C can be prevented by avoidance of unsafe sex and sharing of needles.
For many of us, several of these risk factors are not present for us or our families. But for most of us, at least a few are.
Children especially benefit from education and role models that encourage healthy living. We cannot eliminate all the risks of getting cancer, but we have more control than any of us would have thought not that many years ago.
The ball may still bounce the wrong way, but taking control of some of these behaviors can dramatically improve our chances of a healthy life for us and our family.