It's felt like a cure for cancer is "just around the corner" for at least the last ~20 years, and I'm sure that cancer therapy has absolutely improved a lot in the last 20 years, but we're very far from what a lot of science journalism articles have promised us.
I think the problem is that you're viewing things as either "cures for cancer", or "not cures for cancer". I would suggest instead framing things as, "how on Earth could we possibly cure cancer when human bodies have trillions of moving parts and we only understand half of them?" It's like trying to fix a broken car and not even knowing what internal combustion is.
That's why there hasn't been some magic cure - however huge progress has been made in the past 20 years and the last 5-10 in particular - though it's difficult to disentangle the effects of new treatments from earlier diagnosis - the bottom line for many cancers now the 5 year survival rate is > 90 %.
Note such indicators are lagging - ie you have to wait 5 years to see 5 year survival data etc.
True, but that does not mean that cancer doesn't have some common root cause. I think that everybody who claims that there cannot be any common cure for cancers should be able to explain two things (you can attack them as well, I will be glad to hear your responses):
A. Incidence of most cancers increases with age in a very uniform way. Like, the slopes of the curves are basically identical for very different cancers. It at least seems that "being young" translates into "being very resistant (though not immune) to many cancers at once, and "growing old" is the magic anti-cure which makes you susceptible for all sorts of cancers at the same time.
If all those diseases were genuinely different, you would expect to see more variation in their mathematical properties. There aren't such close correlations between, say, dental caries and tuberculosis. And if "growing old" acts as a "magic anti-cure", maybe there can be the opposite, too. I get that "growing young" is probably complicated, but I am not that certain if it is categorically impossible in the future.
B. Cancer is not just a human disease, but generally a mammalian disease, but some mammalian species are much less prone to cancer than others: whales, elephants, bats. And what is again interesting, is the fact that the species less prone to cancer are less prone to all types of cancer again, not just a single type or two.
Also, birds don't get nearly as many cancers as mammals do - and again, they get less cancer overall, not just one or two types.
For me, this epidemiological uniformity indicates a possible common root cause, something like "a failure of the immune system to hold bad cells in check", regardless of the vast diversity of the symptoms.
For a rough analogy: people dying of AIDS will succumb to a wild variety of deadly infections, but that does not mean that AIDS is a family of very different diseases. It just means that their immune system stopped being able to hold multiple different foes in check. And once you can stop HIV from ravaging the immune system of the patients, all of these diverse deadly infections are prevented at once.
Cancer is caused by random(ish) mutations creating cellular variants that have uncontrolled growth - typically you need multiple mutations. It's related to age mostly because you accumulate mutations over time - it's a game of chance. So the underlying cause is the same - mutations - however there are lots and lots of different ways to mutate a cell into a dangerous state ( that's not to say there are not common mutations found across lots of cancers in key regulatory targets ).
> Different species effects
I don't think this is well understood, but some of that is to do differentials in effective DNA repair or detection of cancer cells by the immune system ( you body can detect and kill cancer cells as if they were foreign invaders ). The other thing is perhaps less exposure to mutation causing agents ( humans are probablyt exposured to lots of mutagenic things at a low level we don't really know about yet - scandals of the future ) - and birds not getting cancer is probably mostly they don't live long enough.
And finally if your cancer get's to a later stage - typically it just hasn't picked up mutations to grow faster it's probably picked up mutations allow it to evolve faster ( ie a higher mutation rate ) - they means a single cancer that started from a single cell can evolve into a tree of related cells with different sets of mutations. ) And it's those different mutations that allow cells to survive in parts of the body they weren't originally from ).
In terms of treatment of cancer you need to try and target a difference between normal and cancer cells - so you tend to go after those differences driven by the mutations - often making the treatments sub-type specific. ie this particular cancer is different from normal in this way - so we target that difference, others might be different in another.
There are some treatments that are more generic - chemo basically targets fast growing cells ( for whatever underlying reasons ) - however these don't differentiate between normal fast growing cells and cancer so they have quite nasty side effects.
To be clear, I am very much not blaming the scientists for this. I'm confident that the work that they are doing is very cool and challenging. I blame science reporting for always feeling like every headline has to suggest that every discovery is going to completely change the world.
So if this NEAT1 is a big deal, it might not save our parents, but it might save our kids.
I'm 34 right now. Nearly everyone dies of cancer or heart disease, and my family doesn't have any history with heart disease but it does have a history of cancer in their late 60's and early 70's, so it's probably cancer that will kill me.
If I can hold on until I'm 74, that's about 40 years from now, maybe I'll benefit from it. That would be pretty cool.
https://www.cancercenter.com/community/blog/2023/06/cancer-r...
Sweet. I'm off to get a pack of Marlboro's then.
> Consider the extremely low incidence of cancer in individuals under 40.
The problem with that methodology is that a single patient could be counted in those statistics multiple times as they age and relapse.
Also your link points out the rates in younger people are increasing. Has cancer changed or has the environment?
No need to satirize the GP. "Secondary" does not mean "irrelevant".
It is unfortunately true that just by growing to be 80, regardles of how clean you eat and drink and breathe, your chances of developing any cancer are higher than by being a young moderate smoker. Aging is the primary factor in oncology and the vast majority of cancer patients are elderly.
> Has cancer changed or has the environment?
Almost certainly the environment. But there is still something like twenty elderly cancer patients for one young.
That's just sarcasm not satirization. I choose that because he seemed to imply that my point was to be entirely ignored because of this data. Which I thought was particularly thin and easily seen through.
> Aging is the primary factor in oncology and the vast majority of cancer patients are elderly.
Okay. I'll spare you the sarcasm. What does this have to do with the strategy involved in eliminating cancer? Particularly for those where treatment is intended to prevent early death? To me it seems like this is completely irrelevant to this point.
> But there is still something like twenty elderly cancer patients for one young.
I understand the data. Do you understand that the one young cancer patient does not want or need to hear this?
Thank you for respecting the rules of local debate.
"Do you understand that the one young cancer patient does not want or need to hear this?"
Well ... is this not actually sarcasm?
What made you think that I am either stupid or callous enough not to care about young cancer patients and their fear and need for support and treatment?
Japan during WW2 committed many atrocious experiments, but we owe a lot of medical knowledge from that.