Global cancer cases will jump 77% by 2050, WHO report estimates

Besides tobacco and alcohol use, obesity and type 2 diabetes are risk factors for cancers. High fructose corn syrup FTW.

This is one of those stats that get abused as fairly benign cancers like certain prostate cancers get diagnosed more.

But as someone who just lost my wife to melanoma, I can tell you that despite the fact that treatment advances has brought 5-year survival rates from 10% to 70%, deaths are increasing. The oncologists I spoke to attribute it to the ozone hole in the 80s and 90s and the tanning bed phenomenon of the 90s and 2000s.

Think of cancer not as a thing but as a disease process. Each variant has different drivers and each treatment regime has different risks. Social and environmental factors drive many negative outcomes.

This is what I tell patients. Eventually something happens to all of us, we just try to extend the time until that happens.

Perhaps some, but only a small amount... current targets are hitting between 8.4-9.5 billion by 2050 (some estimates are we'd have already hit peak and be going down)! At about 8 billion today, we're talking between a 5% and an 18ish% increase. Either way much less than the increase in cancer diagnosis incidence.

Alcohol consumption is linked to increases in liver cancer

I don't get this. 77% is a big increase. Alcohol and tobacco use can't be increasing enough to drive that change. Obesity and pollution are on the rise, but that much?

Edit: autocorrect correction

It’s a risk factor for colorectal cancer, which is not only the 3rd most prevalent type of cancer, but is increasingly being discovered in younger people. Alcohol has a number of deleterious effects, from microbiome destruction, to the genotoxicity of alcohol’s metabolite acetaldehyde, and finally alcohol changes your behavior to make other cancer causing activities like smoking more likely.

I'm not sure it in interesting to lump alcohol in there. I thought everyone knew it was wikdly unhealthy, just also wildly fun.

Air pollution deserves more attention IMO. I live along the Wasatch from in Utah and have been trying to strategize a move out of state because of air pollution. In sure I won't be surprised if it kills me and my family in the end.