You can get cancer the day after you are cleared by screening

Cancer is luck’s fault mostly! – Study

New Delhi, January3: You get yourself screened for cancer today, feel happy you have none. But the very next day could be beginning of cancer in you. It is your bad luck that will cause it!

A new study gives altogether a new twist to cancer tale. It imputes most of the cancers on the sufferers’ bad luck rather than on their faulty genes or lifestyle. The study could leave quest for predicting cancer incidence irrelevant.

The study done by the scientists at Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center, after analyzing whole gamut of cancer incidences globally, has concluded that two-thirds of the global cancer cases are a direct result of bad luck rather than faulty lifestyle or defective DNA. It makes efforts to find ways to predict cancer almost impossibility. The study even makes screening for cancer almost redundant. It makes cancer completely outside human control.

First such study has been undertaken globally. According to researchers of the centre cancers are caused by random mistakes during cell division. They came to these conclusions by searching scientific literature for information on the total number of divisions of stem cells among 31 tissue types during an average individual’s lifetime. Two-thirds of adult cancer incidence across tissues can be explained primarily by “bad luck“when these random mutations occur in genes that can drive cancer growth, while the remaining third are due to environmental factors and inherited genes.

The researchers have created a model that may help quantify how much of these factors contribute to cancer. The model clearly quantifies that most of the cancers are result of bad luck. The researchers found that 22 cancer types could be largely explained by the ‘bad luck’ factor of random DNA mutations during cell division.

After this study, Bert Vogelstein, professor of oncology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine has concluded that all cancers are caused by a combination of bad luck, the environment and heredity.

The study though does not preclude poor life style as a risk factor. The study also shows that risk of getting cancer can be enhanced by poor life style. But the study concludes that many forms of cancer are due largely to the bad luck of acquiring a mutation in a cancer driver gene regardless of lifestyle and heredity factors.