United States: The scientists linked the “modifiable” risk factors with the forty percent of cancer cases and almost half of the cancer deaths in 2019. Study was conducted at the American Cancer Society which performed the follow-up for thirty years.
Such risk factors include smoking, drinking, poor diet, and also not getting vaccinated, as experts explained.
More about the finding
The lead author of the study, Farhad Islami, who is also the senior scientific director of cancer disparity research at the American Cancer Society, said that modifiable risk factors are generally behavioral.
He said, “When we say ‘potentially modifiable,’ those are the risk factors that we have the means and tools to change,” as the Hill reported.
The findings of the study were published in the medical journal – CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, a significant publication of the American Cancer Society.
Study details
The data being observed was fetched from the CDC and the National Cancer Institute’s Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results Program to determine the nation’s cancer rate and deaths in 2019.
They examined over 713,000 cases of cancer cases, in which almost 260,000 cancer deaths were due to thirty types of cancer involving skin, lung, and breast, which had the main cause as a modifiable behavioral risk factor.
The study found that out of all, smoking cigarettes was the most common, contributing to almost 20 percent of all cancer cases and 30 percent of all cancer deaths.
Islami added, “Despite considerable declines in smoking prevalence during the past few decades, the number of lung cancer deaths attributable to cigarette smoking in the United States is alarming,” as the Hill reported.
However, as the study revealed, obesity was the second most contributing modifiable risk factor (in 7.6 percent of cancer cases, with a 7.7 percent role in deaths), followed by alcoholism (5.4 cases, with 4.1 percent of cancer deaths).
Moreover, there is one modifiable risk factor, HPV infection, which contributed to 100 percent of cervical cancer cases and deaths in the US that year, the study found.
Therefore, scientists found that the best way to avoid HPV infection is to inoculate with vaccination against the virus.
On the other hand, other cancer types that had a high association with modifiable risk factors were – skin cancer, lung cancer, larynx, and oral cancer.
It is also revealed that about 92 percent of anal cancer were associated with an infection kind risk factor, whereas 94 percent of larynx cancer and 90 percent of lung cancer cases were linked to a modifiable risk factor, said the study.