Rayshell Clapper, STEAMRegister.com
The C-word: we all fear it, and these days it seems more and more of us suffer from one form of cancer or another. According to the World Cancer Research Fund International, these are the five most diagnosed cancers for both men and women in the world:
Lung
Breast
Colorectum
Prostate
Stomach
When broken down by gender, here are the five most common for men:
Lung
Prostate
Colorectum
Stomach
Liver
For women, they are most diagnosed with the following:
Breast
Colorectum
Lung
Cervix uteri
Stomach and Corpus uteri (endometrium)
When looking at it that way, there are many different cancers that affect many different people. The National Cancer Institute reported that over 13 million Americans lived with cancer as of 2012, which is approximately 39.6 percent of Americans. That should shock us all, and it should inspire us to want to do more to prevent, treat, and heal.
A recent press release from the journal ecancermedicalscience announced the release of a Special Issue that focuses on articles written by doctors, academics, and scientists worldwide about cancer prevention. Specifically, it looks at biomarkers, screening, and prevention.
Biomarkers are those clues to cancer present in a blood sample. These could be genetic, lifestyle, personal, or environmental.
One article in the Special Issue written by Dr. Eva Szabo of the National Cancer Institute in the US “reviews the NCI program on early stage trials to evaluate new cancer agents, and discusses the need for validated biomarkers. Her article offers an excellent and thorough review from an American perspective.” In a different article in the issue, Professor Phillipe Autier of the International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon, France, looks at the risk factors and biomarkers specifically associated with life-threatening cancers. Several other articles look at the biomarkers from different angles, and most of the authors come from a different country and look at a different area of biomarkers.
Screening focuses on the combination that patients have of awareness and availability as brought to them by their doctors while prevention deals with preventing cancer in many ways including health, freedom, relief, time, medication, actions, et cetera. The articles about screening and prevention are more connected than separate. For instance, one article by Dr. Andrea DeCensi of Genova, Italy, looks at prevention in breast cancer while another author, Dr. Giulia Veronesi of the Humanitas Research Hospital in Rozzano, Italy, looked at prevention in lung cancer. In two other articles, authors looked at angioprevention and chemoprevention.
Each area discusses just how important biomarkers, screenings, and prevention are to dealing with cancer. In a world where so many suffer from cancer, the saying that an “ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” definitely holds true. We already know that curing cancer is time-consuming, painful, expensive, and dangerous. Wouldn’t it be better to just prevent cancer altogether? A world without cancer, or at least with limited cancer, is a world that we definitely want. This Special Issue of ecancermedicalscience seeks to better inform readers about the importance of biomarkers, screenings, and prevention as well as to open the discussions so that we can better move forward in ending cancer.
Click here to read the articles for free.
See Also: Bird Brains: Pigeons can spot breast cancer
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