• Question: why is cancer more now?

    Asked by alisondilaurentis to Angus, Christian, Hannah, Laura, Simon on 20 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Hannah Bentham

      Hannah Bentham answered on 20 Jun 2013:

      Ooh difficult question. Not sure I know the answer…it’s quite a complex issue.

      But I would say that maybe more people SEEM to have cancer now because we are better at diagnosing and treating it. Also, standards of living and access to medicine are better so people are less likely to die of other diseases that used to kill lots of people (TB, mumps, bacterial infections …) so people are more likely to live longer. Also, I think the older you are, the higher the risk of getting some form of cancer.

      Cancer is caused by factors such as genetics, diet, tobacco, sun, radiation and environmental carcinogenics, but I wouldn’t say these have change dramatically in recent times.

    • Photo: Simon Holyoake

      Simon Holyoake answered on 20 Jun 2013:

      I think cancer is apparently more widespread and common now is actually because of advances in medicine!

      we are able to detect cancer earlier and in more situations than before, in the past, many cancers would have perhaps gone undetected, and many deaths might have been put down to ‘natural causes’ as cancer was not as well understood.

      Also in the modern world we tend to live longer, and cancer generally affects older people, so in the past, many more people died of other causes before becoming at risk of cancer

    • Photo: Laura Roberts Artal

      Laura Roberts Artal answered on 20 Jun 2013:

      I agree with Hannah and Simon.

      One of the things you’ve always got to ask yourself in science is: am I seeing this thing (in this case cancer) more because there is actually more of it, or because it is being recorded better? I think there is a certain element of this when it comes to cancer, there are more people on the planet, so more chances of a person actually having cancer. Also, as Simon says, we can diagnose it better, so we record it more often than we used to.

Comments