Hacker News Reader

Comment by MicahWedemeyer | Hacker News Reader

I commute by bike in Atlanta. Few of us make it to the point where heart disease or lung cancer is a real issue. Soccer moms chatting on cell phones will be the end of me.

View on HN

Indeed, charts like this may be informative if you have a pretty average lifestyle, but all those people that die from smoking and heart disease would have eventually died from one of the other risk factors, had they continued on.

Recently I read that something like 70+% of all men past a certain age had nascent cancers when they died, regardless of whether cancer killed them. To me that leaves cancer my #1 fear above all others (ignoring "events", like being hit by a car), since our generation is going to live much longer, and thus be hit by even more cancer.

I would not be surprised if everyone turned out to have nascent cancers. As we learn more about human biology, having cancer seems to be less and less a binary thing.

did you seriously just say '100% of non-smokers die too' - if that was an accident... awesome ;-)

I think it was 70% of men past a certain age have prostate cancer. I think in the same study they determined that if you are 65 or older and catch a bought of the prostate cancer, you might as well leave it untreated because you're likely to die from something else before the cancer kills you and the quality of life lost from treatment isn't worth it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com