Study: U.S. cancer deaths are mostly preventable

  21 May 2016    Read: 3079
Study: U.S. cancer deaths are mostly preventable
Americans can prevent their risk of dying from cancer simply by maintaining a healthy lifestyle, according to a new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association Oncology.
Such lifestyle change would decrease cancer deaths by 67 percent for men and 59 percent for women. Similarly, a healthy lifestyle would drop the discovery of new cancers by 41 percent in women and 63 percent in men.

What does this study mean by a "healthy lifestyle"? Don’t smoke, don`t drink too much, maintain a body mass index between 18.5 and 27.5, and exercise 75 to 150 minutes weekly.

So, maybe it’s time to cut back a drink or two at happy hour and jump on an elliptical.

About 89,500 white women and 46,300 white men participated in the study, which looked at deaths of carcinoma (all cancers except skin, brain, lymphatic, hematologic and nonfatal prostate malignancies). The study only looked at Caucasians to avoid any "racial distributions."

In 2014, 16.8 percent of Americans were identified as smokers (smoked almost every day or have smoked at least 100 cigarettes in their lifetime), according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

An estimated 595,690 Americans are expected to die of cancer this year, according to the American Cancer Society.

The study published in JAMA analyzed data from the Nurses’ Health Study, the Health Professionals Follow-up Study and national cancer statistics.

A healthy lifestyle has been shown to reduce the risk of a number of wellness concerns, including memory decline.

A study published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science in January 2015 challenges this new cancer research. It attributes cancer risk to stem cell divisions, not lifestyle, saying the majority of people who get cancer have “bad luck,” although some environmental factors and family genetics can play a role.

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