As the average life expectancy of the population continues to increase, as well as the continuous development of medicine, everyone seems to be no longer unfamiliar with cancer, however, the knowledge of cancer many people are still stuck in a few years or even more than a decade ago. It seems that as long as cancer is mentioned, it is equated with death.
First of all, you should be clear that cancer is actually a mutation of the cell, but why does it happen? Excluding some special cases (e.g., radiation), the main factor in mutation is cellular senescence. Studies have shown that the number of cell assignments and cycles multiplied is the natural lifespan of a human being. Scientist Helfry put fetal cells in incubation fluid to divide and multiply over and over again. When the cell divides to 50 generations, the cell dies. On top of a large amount of experimental data, he proposed to project the life span of a human being based on the number of cell divisions. The cell division cycle is 2.4 years, according to this calculation, the human life expectancy is 120 years.
However, in many cases, people's cells die prematurely due to external factors, such as the environment, or there are mutations before the 50th generation, such as inflammation and damage.
For cancer patients, the vast majority of people eventually die from metastasis. Why does metastasis occur? It is just like human beings, who don't want to live in one place for a long time, the world is so big, he wants to go out and have a look, so he will "migrate" from one place to another, and settle down in that new place, which is also known as metastasis.
In most cases, however, these cells are not so eager to emigrate, and even if they do get into the bloodstream or the lymphatic circulation, most of them die along the way, and only a very small number of them make it to the new organ and settle there.
Perhaps many of you have read similar reports. After testing the cells of many long-lived elderly people, it was found that there were cancer cells in their bodies long ago, just that they themselves were not aware of it, so a conclusion was drawn that medical checkups are useless.
In fact, this is a misinterpretation and misinterpretation of this fact. Research has found that about 30% of men in their 30s have cancerous cells in their prostate, and 70% of those over 60, but only 14% will actually be diagnosed with prostate cancer. This is because the body and cancer cells can **** survive most of the time, even for life***.
If cancer cells can ****survive*** with the body, then why kill each other?
In fact, the ability of a simple cancer cell is very fragile, he wants to grow himself must have a suitable environment. So he needs to wait, for a new genetic mutation, a new mutation that will allow the cancer cells to grow faster and not die easily, and at the same time, allow the cancer cells to modify their surroundings to serve themselves and escape the supervision of the immune system.
So while cancer cells can **** with the body for a long time, once a new mutation occurs the relationship breaks down and they kill each other.
The relationship between humans and nature 200,000 years ago seems to be the same, and in that era, people were dependent on nature for survival, but with the advent of the industrial age, people began to gradually grow stronger, and even wanted to dominate nature.
And isn't this behavior much like cancer?
So, are humans the cancer cells of the Earth? If humans are considered to be the cancer of the Earth, will the Earth survive with cancer for a long time, or will it not have long to live? Are humans a cancer of the Earth, or a cancer of the universe? If the Earth is just an organ, not a whole, then is our migration to other planets the new "cancer metastasis"?
Simply put, the product of cancer is actually the natural aging of cells and the decline of the immune system, which ultimately leads to cellular mutation and the formation of cancer cells. But trying to stop cellular aging this seems impossible, which is as ironic as the immortality that ancient kings always wanted to pursue, which would only end up with a faster death.
So cancer, as an endogenous disease, is not likely to go away. The task of attacking cancer is not to eliminate it completely, but to turn it into a manageable chronic disease.
Since, we can't stop cellular senescence, it seems that the only thing we can do is to continually elevate or maintain the level of the body's immune system in order to effectively stop cellular mutation. So, to live longer, a healthy lifestyle is king. Exercise actively, eat less pickled and barbecued food, stop smoking and drinking, and so on.
Even though we know that cancer is a "given", there are still people who want to kill the cancer cells, kill them before they become bad people, or kill all the bad people.
Speaking of which, we have to mention the immune system in the human body, the immune system is like the police and the law in the human society, the crime rate rises in most cases because of the low cost of the crime as well as the legal system's regulation is not strict, and the reason why the cells will become cancer cells is because the immune system did not fulfill its own duties, which led to the "good guy" become "bad guy", "bad guy", "bad guy", "bad guy", "bad guy", "bad guy". The cell becomes cancerous because the immune system fails to fulfill its role, causing the "good guy" to become the "bad guy".
From a medical point of view, the struggle between cancer cells and the immune system is called "immunoediting". The entire process usually spans a decade, if not decades. Part 1: Immune clearance. The immune system is strong, and when a cancer cell comes out, it kills it. Part 2: Immune balance. With social unrest and cancer cells popping up, the immune system is busy and keeps killing, but it can't get rid of the roots. Part 3: Immune Escape. The immune system fails, and the cancer cells escape regulation and even turn on the immune system, aiding and abetting the cancer. This is when we see cancer.
From this perspective, it's more important for people to build their immune systems better, rather than drive cancer cells to extinction. And for immunity enhancement, even the most expensive supplements can't compare to the free 12-word phrase "regular exercise, balanced diet, and abstinence from smoking and alcohol". Studies have found that people who exercise four to six hours a week have significantly lower rates of most cancers than those who do not.
It is undeniable that the number of cancer patients in China is rising every year, and among the many types of cancer, stomach cancer, liver cancer, and esophageal cancer are the three types of cancer that are highly prevalent in China, but rare in the United States. In fact, these three cancers are also known as "poor people's cancers" because they are more prevalent in developing countries, such as China, and less prevalent in developed countries. More than 50% of the world's liver cancer patients are in China!
So why is the incidence of these diseases so high in China?
There are at least two main reasons:
One is because of the characteristics of the cancer itself, such as the complexity of the tumor biology, the faster progression, the more advanced stage of discovery, the fact that many of them are insensitive to chemotherapy, the absence of mutated genes suitable for targeted drugs, and so on.
Secondly, it is because of the low incidence and insufficient research in developed countries. Because Europe and the United States "poor cancer" patients are few, sampling to research is not easy, and not easy to make money, so the long-term interest of pharmaceutical companies is limited, few new drugs.
Moreover, these diseases are strongly associated with infections and lifestyle habits.
This sounds terrible, but there is good news: since there are fewer "poor people's cancers" in Europe and the US, it means that they don't come with age, but are largely avoidable.
We hope that after we understand the causes of the disease, we can try to adjust our living habits according to our own and our family's situation, and prevent it as early as possible, so that the risk can be greatly reduced.
As we all know, exercise can improve the body's immunity, so as to achieve a certain role in cancer. The U.S. Cancer Center also published a research paper that analyzed data from 1.44 million people in the U.S. and Europe and found that exercise can significantly reduce the incidence of 13 types of cancer. While there have been a number of previous articles, this is by far the largest and most comprehensive study.
Through the study, it was found that to have a risk-reducing effect, the amount of exercise is important, what kind of exercise is less important, and it doesn't need to be strenuous. Running, playing soccer, Tai Chi, square dancing, whatever you like.
In a study of 26 cancers, it was found that exercise significantly reduced the incidence of 13 of them,
respectively (percentages of reduction in parentheses):
Eight of the top 10 cancers in China can have their risk reduced by exercise. Let's look at it again, esophageal adenocarcinoma is reduced by 42%! Liver cancer 27%! Lung cancer 26%!
When it comes to lung cancer, the number one cause that probably comes to mind is smoking. And in this study, an interesting finding was that if you smoke, or have ever smoked, exercise reduces the incidence of lung cancer by >30%! But for non-smokers, exercise prevented many types of cancer, but had no effect on lung cancer. Does this also indicate that the mechanism of lung cancer development is completely different for smokers and non-smokers? I think that's better left for scientists to study.
In China more than 700 million women and children are long-term victims of secondhand smoke, both at home and in public ****. The World Health Organization estimates that secondhand smoke alone kills 100,000 people in China every year, the equivalent of a Wenchuan earthquake every year! This 100,000 people, there are many non-smoking women lung cancer patients. Studies have shown that if a husband smokes, the probability of his wife getting lung cancer is more than 200% of the general population. So before you even think about lighting up a cigarette, you may not think about yourself, but think about the people around you.
Just because quitting smoking doesn't have an immediate effect on everyone or society as a whole doesn't mean we should sit back and do nothing. When fewer people start smoking, we can look forward to a slightly better world 25 years from now.
From a conceptual point of view, modern medicine has gone through at least four revolutions in the fight against cancer, the first being surgery, the second being radiotherapy and chemotherapy, the third being genetic testing and targeted drugs, and the fourth being immunotherapy.
For targeted drugs, the one that is familiar to everyone is the targeted drug Gleevec, which is used to treat leukemia in the movie "I Am Not the God of Medicine". Gleevec is a targeted drug that was developed early on to treat leukemia.
Targeted drugs, as the name implies, work on specific targets on cancer cells, such as a specific gene mutation. The goal of both targeted drugs and chemotherapy is to directly kill as many cancer cells as possible. Targeted drugs are more selective than chemotherapy. It can effectively inhibit cancer cells without causing significant harm to normal cells, and therefore has much fewer side effects.
However, immunotherapy is very different in that it works not on cancer cells, but on immune cells. These drugs do not directly kill the cancer cells themselves, but rather activate the immune system against the cancer cells, and then allow the large number of active immune cells to fulfill their mission by becoming a true weapon against cancer.
Targeted drugs often target proteins that are very important for tumor growth, and can be considered important food for cancer cell growth. By inhibiting the activity of these proteins, targeted drugs can "starve" cancer cells to death. However, due to various reasons, the drugs will also "starve" some normal cells and produce side effects, which is somewhat similar to chemotherapy. The function of immune drugs is to activate immune cells to fight against cancer cells. However, they also have side effects and are not risk-free. The activated immune cells can attack not only cancer cells, but also their own normal cells, which can produce a temporary "autoimmune disease" that can be fatal.
It may seem that the immunotherapy approach is more advanced, but the biggest problem with immunotherapy drugs is that they are not very effective at all, at 10% to 20% (except for certain tumor types), so for many people they are not effective. In addition to the phenomenon of "false progression", most people's tumors do not shrink at first. But the advantage of immunotherapy is that if it responds, the patient is likely to benefit in the long term, which is known as the "trailing edge" of the survival curve: a small percentage of patients will survive for a long time, or even be cured.
Disease is not just a pain in the ass, but a "double victim" for the family. On the one hand, they bear the financial, physical, and mental burden of caring for the patient; on the other hand, they face the grief of losing a loved one.
Family members caring for cancer patients have significant mental health problems, some worse than those of the patients themselves. All the emotional ups and downs that the patient goes through are felt by the family.
The book gives the following advice, which is reproduced below:
The question of whether the patient needs to be told the truth should be a matter of charity. One of the first decisions a family may face when they learn of a medical condition is, "Should the patient be told the truth?"
The authors of this book do not simply state that "the patient has a right to know the truth" in a prescriptive or ethical sense, but rather in terms of the patient's subjective wishes.
A wise man once said, "The meaning of life is to learn to face death." However, this topic is very taboo for China, especially so for the older ones. So the result is that young people are still far away from death, so they don't think about it and discuss it, while older people are a little closer, but they avoid talking about it. This may seem easy, but it leaves a hidden danger for the family, even for the closest relatives, it is difficult to make a decision on such a critical issue as life and death, and if there is a slight deviation in the family's decision or if the decision is not as good as it should be, the family may be left with a psychological burden that cannot be erased. Instead, returning the decision to the patient (who is capable of independent thought and willing to take control of his or her own life) not only strengthens the patient's treatment, but also reduces the family's burden of decision-making.
When illness strikes, any patient who thinks independently will actually feel that the situation is not good. So, in this case, the family's concealment is even more meaningless.
In the United States, every year, there are many companies due to the research of an anti-cancer drug and ultimately did not succeed in the market and go bankrupt, which seems to be in the capital market has also become a capitalist casino.
However, as artificial intelligence continues to evolve, this long and costly process could be made much shorter. Machines could help people find more appropriate formulas and even find more appropriate clinical patients based on their genetic data.
As precision medicine continues to advance, whether it's cancer or other diseases, there will be a greater emphasis on treatments for genes, which will require a lot of data and a lot of calculations.
Both doctors and patients will encounter two or even more sets of treatments, and in the past, when faced with difficult choices, we relied on our doctors, trusting them to make the best choices because they had at least two assets: authoritative clinical guidelines (e.g., the NCCN guidelines) and their own experience.
But in the era of precision medicine, both of these assets are being challenged.
First, guidelines generally provide recommendations for mainstream treatments for a "class of patients" based on clinical trial results, but they are not optimal for all patients. It's like a middle school teacher, who tends to target the "middle students" in class, but the best students get bored, the worst students don't get it, and half the students are wasting their time.
Thus, the best treatment for each patient depends on the experience of the doctor.
But is this experience reliable? Because treatment options are changing so rapidly these days, new drugs are appearing so quickly, and information is exploding, doctors are unlikely to have enough time to digest and practice, and by the time they've practiced enough, completely different new drugs come along and the guidelines change. The chief physician with 20 years of extensive chemotherapy experience has to learn from scratch when it comes to targeted and immunologic drugs, and although past experience is still valuable, it is greatly diminished.
This is not a problem in China. Even in the US, a cancer patient who sees 3 equally authoritative doctors will most likely get 3 different treatment plans. Who should be trusted?
So, utilizing AI can not only reduce the cost of drug development, but also provide a clearer plan for the direction of treatment afterward.
This is a popular book on cancer. When you read this book, you will have a new understanding of cancer as a disease.
The understanding of cancer is still the same as it was 10 years ago or even in the last century. However, the naming, diagnosis, and treatment of different cancers have evolved over generations. For many cancers, the initial treatment program has been very mature, although it may not be completely cured, but the survival rate of 5 years or even more than 10 years has been very high. (Note: The reason why it is 5 or 10 years rather than longer is that the longer the time, the greater the chance of a change, as the patient may well die in a traffic accident in the 6th year, rather than from cancer)
The way cancer treatment is being carried out, people should gradually convert to a rational control of the disease rather than to a complete cure, just as in the modern world where many people have high blood pressure or diabetes. But few, if any, would consider it a disease of immediate death. In many cases, the attitude toward the condition is far more important than a set of treatment options.
This is the first time that we've seen a disease like this.