Cancer is the uncontrolled, anarchic multiplication of cells that escape the body’s regulatory mechanisms which ensure harmonious organisation and development.
– Cancer and cancer
In the public mind, cancer and cancerous cells are the same thing. Well, they’re not. We produce cancer cells every day, hundreds of them, and fortunately our immune system is able to fight them off. Sometimes our defences are overwhelmed, and then cancer may develop.
– From cell to nodule
Sometimes these cells accumulate into small cancerous nodules or tumours (little balls). These tumours can grow, remain latent during the person’s lifetime or even disappear. In rarer situations, these cells escape all control, multiply, invade the body and lead to the patient’s death.
– Cells, in everyone!
In the case of the prostate gland, for example, cells are very common in men. Half of all men over 60, and almost all men over 90, have cancer cells in their prostate. 80% of men over 80 have silent cancer.
In the case of breast cancer, a study of autopsies of women who had died of something else showed that 37% of women carried unexpressed cancers between the ages of 40 and 54, and 39% between the ages of 40 and 49. Out of 686 autopsied women who had died of causes other than cancer, the rate of tumours found in the breasts was 4 times that of the living population at the same time as the study. These tumours remained ‘silent’.
We need to put things into perspective:
For every 100 women who die, 4 die from breast cancer, 20 from other causes of cancer and 30 from cardiovascular disease. (ref: Hill C. Breast cancer screening. Presse med. 2014 May;43(5):501-9.)
The only two criteria for assessing the effectiveness of cancer screening are :
– a significant reduction in mortality from this cancer,
– a decrease in the rate of advanced cancers.
Risk factors
For some cancers, the risk factors are easy to identify: asbestos for mesothelioma (a cancer of the pleura), smoking for bronchopulmonary cancer.
In the case of breast cancer, things are more complex. There are the known risk factors, the probable risk factors, and the so-called ‘protective’ factors.
The risk factors recognised as such:
✹ age (cancer statistically more common over the age of 50) ;
✹ gender (cancer is significantly more common in women);
✹ people with a genetic predisposition (alteration of the BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene, whose function is to repair DNA damage that the breast cell may have undergone) ;
✹ repeated irradiating examinations of the thoracic area (X-rays, scans).
Possible risk factors would be for some without absolute certainty:
✹ obesity ;
✹ unhealthy physical activity;
✹ use of oestroprogestogenic contraceptives (the pill)
✹ a harmful industrial or agricultural environment;
✹ staggered working hours and night work;
✹ active or passive smoking
✹ alcohol consumption;
✹ early puberty;
✹ a late first pregnancy;
✹ the choice of artificial breastfeeding
✹ a late menopause;
✹ taking hormone treatment for the menopause
Protective factors are:
✹ late onset of menarche;
✹ a first child before the age of 20 ;
✹ breast-feeding;
✹ regular physical activity.
✹ Vit D supplementation would also reduce the risk of breast cancer
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