33% of All Women and 50% of All Men are Affected By Cancer

Chances are that you or a member of your family will be affected by cancer at some point--and probably will die of it. In the United States, one in two men will develop cancer in his lifetime. For women, the figure is one in three.

That means that this year, about 1.23 million people in the United States will learn that they have cancer and about 565,000 Americans will die from it. That's more than 1,500 people a day, making cancer the second-leading cause of death in this country, behind heart disease.

Cancer is nothing more than cells that shouldn't divide and grow, but do. That doesn't mean they are lethal. A common wart is a tumor but is harmless, or benign, because it eventually stops growing and stays put. A tumor is malignant when it continues to grow. It can spread, or metastasize, by shedding tiny diseased cells that ride through the circulatory or lymph system to a new home, possibly the liver or lungs. Cancer kills when it eventually prevents a vital organ from working.

There isn't just one cancer. Because there are so many different kinds of tissues and organs in the body, there are more than 100 distinct types of cancers. Each behaves in its own way and so must be treated differently. That makes cancer insidiously difficult to tame. Using chemotherapy to stop cells from dividing can be effective in some cancers, but not others. Lumps of cancer, so-called solid tumors, can be surgically removed, but microscopic cancer cells may remain and grow again. New methods being investigated involve turning the body's own immune system on cancer or starving tumors by cutting off their blood supplies.

Although there are many different kinds, a cancer of 13 body sites account for about 85 percent of all cancers. The four most common, accounting for more than half of all cases, are those of the prostate, breast, lung, and colon-rectum. Lung cancer, the most lethal of all, is responsible for nearly 30 percent of all cancers. The one place where cancer doesn't occur is the heart; that's because the heart cells cannot divide.

What produces cancer is also a complex story. The environment--chemicals, radiation or viruses, can cause it for example. Or it can be produced within your own body by excess hormones, errant immune conditions or genetic flaws. You can personally increase your risk by smoking or eating certain foods. There is evidence that up to one-third of cancer deaths each year are related to nutrition, although no one has figured out why bacon might cause cancer in one person but not another.

Worse still, what you ate 10 years ago may only now start taking its toll. It usually requires a decade for the "triggering event" to produce cancerous tumors.

There is some good news, however. According to the government, the rate of cancer declined slightly between 1990 and 1995.

"50% of all cancer is preventable through proper nutrition" American Cancer Society

By Renee Twombly, Associate Director of the Duke University Medical Center News Office. This is out of the Minneapolis daily paper 4/29/97.