For an individual, if cancer cannot be cured, for example, many advanced cancers cannot be cured, then his life span will definitely be affected. If he has an incurable disease at the age of 40 (some cancers may be cured in the late stage, so the conditions should be limited), even if he has an incurable disease, he can live for five years through treatment, that is, to be 45 years old. Obviously, his life expectancy will drop significantly, because if he doesn't get it. Therefore, if cancer is conquered, that is, cancer can be cured, no matter what condition, all cancers can be cured as long as they have cancer, no matter what type of cancer, no matter what stage of cancer, and he will not die of this cancer, then the person's survival time will be significantly prolonged. But, of course, this is only relative to his survival time with cancer. If he beats cancer, his life expectancy will not increase. For example, he can only live to 70 years old without cancer, but he can live to 70 years old without cancer and live longer.
As far as mankind as a whole is concerned, cancer is not the main factor affecting life expectancy, and cancer is just one of many diseases. Some people will say that cancer can be fatal, yes, as I said before, it is for individuals. In fact, the life span of human beings will not be greatly improved because of the conquest of cancer (if cancer can be conquered, it is only a hypothesis, but not really conquered). Don't make it seem that the length of human life is stuck in cancer. Think about it, thousands of years ago, even hundreds of years ago, didn't you say that there were few cancers at that time? It's not that there are too many cancers now, yes, there are too many cancers now, and there were too few cancers hundreds of years ago. Is this the average life expectancy now or hundreds of years ago? Needless to say, now, of course. That's weird. There are more cancers, but the average life expectancy is longer. Didn't you say that human life is stuck in cancer? ...
If cancer is conquered, the average life expectancy will increase and the individual life expectancy will not change.
1, if cancer is conquered, the life span of other diseases and healthy people will not change, because people's life span is mainly determined by genetics and lifestyle. If a family has longevity genes, or has a better lifestyle and healthy eating habits. For example, I am hardworking, optimistic and kind, and I don't smoke or drink. These are all good factors to prolong life.
If cancer is conquered, the average life expectancy will increase.
The calculation of life expectancy per capita is related to the mortality level of the same generation. Without cancer, the second leading cause of death, the average number of people of different ages will increase relatively, and the estimated average life expectancy of the population will be greatly improved.
If human beings conquer cancer, the average life expectancy of human beings will increase by more than 30 years. Why can human life span be increased by more than 30 years?
First, because there are too many people among us, cancer took their young lives early. Because cancer is not just those chronic diseases.
What kind of disease is cancer? Cancer is genetic, cardiovascular failure, infection, nervous system out of control, and so on. There is no doubt that systemic syndrome has erupted and spread in the human body, and it is very difficult to cure cancer effectively, but it is only a lucky cure. We humans really conquered cancer, and the average life expectancy increased by 30 years.
After we humans really conquer cancer, it is completely equivalent to conquering all our acute and chronic diseases, including genetic diseases. As we all know, people, except accidents, will not easily lose their lives without any diseases. People will lose their lives whatever they do, almost all of which are caused by diseases.
If you want to conquer cancer, you can't rely on a single medical technology or a simple anti-cancer specific drug, but on the flexible treatment of general medical technology and comprehensive specific drugs including influenza, so that you can truly conquer cancer.
Imagine that our modern medicine can cure a few diseases except vaccines, blood transfusion and surgery, and almost all other acute and chronic diseases, including influenza, are incurable. It is really a long way to go to conquer and cure cancer and extend the average life expectancy of human beings for more than 30 years.
100 years old is ok! But diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, hepatitis, tuberculosis and Alzheimer's disease should not be underestimated! In fact, as long as you have a regular physical examination, 100 years old is ok!
For cancer individuals, it will affect life expectancy. But now this assumption is difficult for human beings to establish. Although medicine is progressing, there is still a long way to go to beat cancer. Many natural and unnatural factors will affect people's life span, so the study of life span is a comprehensive matter.
So far, scientists have not really cracked the human life code, so the so-called life extension is just a guess. It is not enough to conquer cancer.
According to the years of life lost, a study found out the top ten causes of death in China in 20 17 from 282 types of causes of death, namely: stroke, ischemic heart disease, respiratory system (trachea, bronchus and lung) cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, liver cancer, road traffic injury, dementia such as gastric cancer and Alzheimer's Harmo's disease, neonatal disease and hypertensive heart disease. Cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases are the most common causes of death.
It is not enough to conquer cancer, but if we can conquer cancer, we believe that there will be great scientific and technological progress and breakthroughs in anti-aging, anti-aging of human organs, greatly improving the function and metabolism of human immune system, and prolonging human life. You can only believe in the future. If you want to live a long life, your mentality is also very important.
Suppose cancer is conquered. Without cancer, will people's life span be greatly extended? Based on the hypothetical proposition, without real data, we can analyze and calculate how much cancer affects people's life span.
According to the National Cancer Center, cancer accounts for about 23% of all deaths among residents. Without cancer, the life expectancy of these people will definitely be longer than now, and the overall average life expectancy of people will be prolonged. However, there is one problem that has to be considered. Based on the current average life expectancy of 76 years in China, if the patient dies at the age of 75, the life expectancy will be less 1 year. Cancer is still mostly in the elderly, so cancer has an impact on people's average life expectancy, but it should not be too great.
If cancer is conquered, will there be other chronic diseases? Such as hypertension, diabetes, cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases, they are also a great threat to people. Generally speaking, cancer is a little faster than their life-threatening speed, but there are many cases of such diseases, much more than cancer patients, so no cancer may eventually have little impact on people's average life expectancy.
If the cancer patient is an individual, the impact is absolute. Overcoming cancer is life-saving for young people, and it is true for elderly patients to extend it for several years!
There are many kinds of cancers. The current coping strategy is not to conquer it, but to prolong the survival time of patients and improve their quality of life. Patients may live with tumors. Cancer is still a geriatric disease in general, which is closely related to people's life span. It is also a chronic disease, which will have some impact on people's life span, but it is unlikely to greatly improve life span if cancer is defeated without cancer. I'm Dr. @ Liu Yongyi, thank you for reading!
Han Yisheng believes that even if cancer is conquered, the average life expectancy of human beings will not be greatly improved, at least in China.
But as an "agnostic", Han Yisheng thinks that aging and cancer are medical problems that human beings can't overcome. Otherwise, it will cause great disaster to mankind. But whether cancer can be overcome is not the key to this problem. The problem of the subject is based on the fact that human beings have conquered cancer.
As far as China is concerned, although previous surveys show that China is the largest country in cancer illness and death, a survey published by the international authoritative medical journal The Lancet 20 18 shows that the leading cause of death in China is not cancer, but stroke; The second major factor is not cancer, but ischemic heart disease!
Even in the ranking of causes of death, only the third, fifth and seventh places are cancers, namely lung cancer, liver cancer and stomach cancer. Other chronic diseases, traffic injuries, Alzheimer's disease, neonatal diseases and hypertensive heart disease account for a large proportion of the deaths of China residents.
Generally speaking, the proportion of cancer in all deaths is not high, and many of them are elderly patients. Therefore, even if cancer is conquered, the average life expectancy of human beings will not be significantly improved. But improvement is inevitable, just because the proportion is low after all, and the ideal effect cannot be achieved.
To answer this question, we must first understand why cancer is so difficult to overcome. You know, cancer is a very complicated thing, and it can't be defeated casually.
Of course, according to the current medical technology, we are still making progress. I remember hearing that someone had cancer when I was a child. The first feeling is that they must not live long. When I was a child, my understanding of cancer was only superficial. I think getting cancer means constant chemotherapy+hair loss. Now, I believe most people have seen how much progress has been made in this field. From the popularization of early screening, some patients with early cancer may be cured, to the emergence of various new cancer drugs, the side effects are getting smaller and smaller.
Although cancer cannot be defeated, it can still prolong the life span of cancer patients and further alleviate their pain as far as possible.
For example, if we are infected by bacteria, we can eat antibiotics directly to kill bacteria, and antibiotics will not harm our healthy cells. However, the treatment of cancer is not so easy. First of all, because our own cells are different from bacterial cells, antibiotics can recognize bacteria and will not attack our own cells. Of course, cancer cells are different from normal cells, which is why we can treat cancer with chemotherapy (chemotherapy kills cancer cells, but keeps healthy cells).
Second: … Compared with terrorists, cancer cells are quite like cults, because they can "brainwash" the surrounding tissues and generate new blood vessels to support their own survival. For example, pancreatic cancer, the king of cancer, is very awesome. Why? Because there is a kind of pancreatic cancer that can stimulate the surrounding cells to form a "protective shell" for themselves, so that chemotherapy drugs can't attack.
Third: cancer can spread and transfer->; Cancer spread and metastasis, as the name implies, is that cancer cells enter blood vessels, then spread to another part of the body, and then grow new tumors in that new place. So, if you can't kill all the cancer cells, the tumor will grow back. If cancer cells enter the blood and spread to the whole body, there is basically no possibility of surgery.
Fourth: Take bacterial infection as an example. Antibiotics can kill bacteria, but different cancers are really like different locks. No master key can open all the locks. Just as straight men see all colors are big red, but in the eyes of fairies, there are rotten tomato red, cherry red, menstrual red and so on ... Cancer also includes lung cancer, breast cancer and esophageal cancer, and lung cancer is also divided into small cell lung cancer, non-small cell lung cancer and squamous cell cancer.
What's more, sometimes, more than one lock is broken, but many different locks are broken. Those locks that we can't repair will continue to spread and transfer! ! Sometimes, two people with the same cancer have different cell mutations, so this treatment is useful for one person, but not necessarily for the other. ...
Fortunately, there is immunotherapy, which is to let our immune system attack cancer cells, but these are not enough. Because of the diversity of cancer, immunotherapy cannot cover all cancers and all cancer patients. Of course, there are many new studies on immunotherapy and other treatments for cancer. Although there is still a certain distance to completely cure the advanced cancer, I believe that the 5-year survival rate will be higher ~ the effect is not bad.
According to the biological principle, the life span of mammals is 5-7 times that of their growth period, and the growth period of human beings is calculated from the time when the last tooth comes out (20-25 years old), so the shortest life span of human beings is 100 years old and the longest is 175 years old. It is recognized that a person's normal life span should be 120 years old. In other words, our physiological life span is about 120 years old.
China has an average life expectancy of 76 years, and Japan is recognized as the longest-lived country, with an average life expectancy of 83.7 years. If we conquer diseases such as cancer, our life span is likely to be extended by 30-40 years.
The question is, how do we conquer cancer? Put your hopes on the progress of treatment technology?
No, the key for mankind to overcome cancer is prevention.
Cancer is actually caused by a group of cells that don't know how to stop dividing. This is an endogenous and systemic disease. Stimulated by genes and bad environment, a normal cell may suddenly grow and divide wildly, constantly absorb nutrients from surrounding tissues, destroy the function of normal tissues, and gradually evolve into terrible cancer.
In fact, about 3000 normal cells mutate every day. Fortunately, the human repair system can identify these mutant cells and destroy them before they become cancer cells. However, if stimulated by excessive adverse environment, these unruly cells will become more and more strong, which may even make the repair system difficult to cope with and lead to cancer.
The formation of cancer is actually a long process of the game between human repair system and mutant cells. The winning cancer cells continue to divide and proliferate in the human body, and it takes about 8- 10 years to form a tumor the size of a grain of rice. This is called carcinoma in situ. After that, the cancer progressed rapidly. It takes about 1-3 years to develop from carcinoma in situ to peanut grain size, and it takes about 8 months to develop to walnut size. At this time, it was the middle and late stage of cancer, and it took only 3-6 months to develop from walnut size to fist size. At this time, it is already in the advanced stage of cancer.
Therefore, it is difficult for us to find a way to cure cancer completely, but we can find ways to prevent it in advance and find it early, so that cancer can become an acceptable chronic disease.
The effect of cancer screening in the United States has given us a good enlightenment.
Colorectal cancer is one of the major cancers in the United States, but in the past 10 years, its incidence rate has decreased at an annual rate of 3%. This is mainly due to the screening of colorectal cancer, especially the popularization of colonoscopy.
In 1990s, the United States carried out colorectal cancer screening. According to statistics, in 2006, 60.8% people aged 50 to 75 in the United States participated in at least one screening.
At present, the screening of many cancers, including lung cancer, cervical cancer, prostate cancer and colorectal cancer, has been strongly supported by high-level evidence-based medical evidence. Controlling some precancerous lesions or early cancer in time will have a multiplier effect on the overall cancer prevention and treatment.
In addition to early screening, prevention should also be done in advance.
Take the United States as an example Smoking is obviously a carcinogen. In recent years, the United States has made great achievements in tobacco control. The smoking rate of American adults has dropped to 15%, of which 16.7% for men and 13.6% for women. According to the 20 17 American cancer data survey report, from 1990 to 20 14, the mortality rate of male lung cancer in the United States decreased by 43% through tobacco control.
The following is a list of risk factors related to cancer, and the proportion of different factors leading to cancer (ca cancer j clin 2018; 68:3 1–54)。 In other words, to prevent cancer, we should start from the following aspects.
In fact, it is very difficult for human beings to conquer cancer, which may take decades or even hundreds of years, but there are many ways to prevent and screen it early. Hope for the future, it is better to do a good job in cancer prevention and early screening from now on.
In fact, cancer is only one aspect that affects life expectancy, and there are still many cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases that have not been overcome. So simply curing cancer will increase human life span. This figure is difficult to estimate because there are many factors that may affect the result.
At present, the diseases that affect human survival include acute myocardial infarction, acute aortic dissection, acute massive cerebral infarction or cerebral hemorrhage. Too many diseases have not been overcome, and the hope of prolonging life simply by curing cancer is estimated to be small. Looking at the data specifically, this is only the number of patients with acute myocardial infarction and deaths.
Let's look at the statistics of cancer! According to statistics, in 20 15 years, there were 4.29 million cancer patients and 2.8 million newly diagnosed cancer patients in China, totaling about 765,438+10,000. Later, it was concluded that the incidence of cancer in China was increasing, while the mortality rate was decreasing. Now the incidence rate has become about 1 10,000 people per day and 3.65 million people per year, which is very large.
In fact, even if cancer patients are cured, their lives will only be extended a little. After all, the older you get, the higher the incidence rate, which should be paid attention to.
In short, it is still very limited to prolong life simply by curing cancer. It is suggested to consider the influence figures of other critical diseases, such as death from acute myocardial infarction, death from acute pulmonary embolism and death from acute stroke. This is a very large project, with a large amount of calculation and a large amount of data to be collected. How many of them can do it, but what's the point? Because cancer has not been conquered, just look at the results and you will know how many people still have meaningless things.