Cancer Can Be Avoided; Not Caused by 'Bad Luck': Study

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Cancer, for the most part, is caused by environmental and lifestyle factors and people can do something on preventing them, a new study suggests. These findings fly in the face of another study published earlier in 2015, which says that majority of cancers can be attributed to chance rather than any other factors.

Researchers from the Stony Brook Cancer Center in New York found out that a change in the environment could actually increase the risk of developing cancer. They looked into the scenario when people moved from low-cancer-risk areas to areas of high risk, among other things, according to WebMD.

The findings of the study show that about 70 percent to 90 percent of the most common cancers are due to factors in one's environment, such as toxic chemicals and radiation. Smoking tobacco is also one of the main carcinogens according to the study.

"Environmental factors play important roles in cancer incidence and they are modifiable through lifestyle changes and/or vaccination," the researchers wrote in their study, which was published in the journal Nature.

"Large risk proportions for cancer are attributable to changing environments" such as smoking and air pollutants, as well as, exposure to the sun and poor diet according to the researchers who took into account the increasing incidences of various types of cancers, including lung cancer, CNN reported.

Back in January, another study published in the journal Science suggested that the variation in cancer risk among tissues can be explained by the number of stem cell divisions. The findings of this study concluded that only a third of the variation in cancer risk among tissues can be blamed to environmental factors or genetics.

It went on to say that the majority of cancer is because of "bad luck." This unfortunate instances is due to random mutations that occur during DNA replication in normal, noncancerous stem cells, BBC noted.

Dr Yusuf Hannun, the director of Stony Brook, told the BBC News that those people who smoke and develop cancer, in the process, cannot say that they were just unlucky. He said that extrinsic factors really do play a big part and we should not simply reduce everything to bad luck.

"It is like a revolver, intrinsic risk is one bullet... now, what a smoker does is add two or three more bullets to that revolver. And now, they pull the trigger," he said. "From a public health point of view, we want to remove as many bullets as possible from the chamber."