Discussion
Hoofy said:
People would have died of other illnesses way before cancer settled in.
Not to mention eaten by sabre tooth tigers, stamped on by wooly mammoths, chopped up by the boys from the village next door who you were at perpetual war with or sacrificed to the gods in the hope of a good crop come harvest. Getting to 30 was a major achievement.Tannedbaldhead said:
Not to mention eaten by sabre tooth tigers, stamped on by wooly mammoths, chopped up by the boys from the village next door who you were at perpetual war with or sacrificed to the gods in the hope of a good crop come harvest. Getting to 30 was a major achievement.
Pretty much - although 1000BC... woolly mammoths around?There are pretty clear accounts of tumours/cankers that go back at least that far, surely... like others I'm astounded that it's even being suggested that it might not have been around then.
Although that said, once you get back to times or places where the average life expectancy was under 40, you would see less obvious cancer because there'd be more things killing people first. Plus the ease of misdiagnosing it as things like 'consumption'.
Although that said, once you get back to times or places where the average life expectancy was under 40, you would see less obvious cancer because there'd be more things killing people first. Plus the ease of misdiagnosing it as things like 'consumption'.
As mentioned earlier, there would certainly have been cancer affecting both young and old as now but cancer rates rise sharply with age and most people would have died of something else (particularly infectious diseases) before reaching what we regard as old age. In a primitive society one would have expected the girls / young women to be pregnant shortly after puberty (which was later then than now) and to be grandparents by their 30s (as in some strata of our current society). In a hunter-gatherer society young grandparents are of some value as child-minders, a source of knowledge, assisting in the hunt & gathering, but as they age, are more of a drag than a help once their grandchildren were able to keep up with the group, so there was little survival advantage to the species in having individuals living over 40-50. One could argue therefore that the common fatal diseases of people older than that in our society are those which haven't been selected against by evolution (plus some effect from our lifestyle). Dementia, cancer, ischaemic heart disease / peripheral vascular disease and stroke all fall into that category. We have lots of mechanisms to protect against cancer, from DNA repair enzymes to melanin in our skin and our immune system, and generally they do a good job for 50-60 years, but after that, it doesn't matter in purely selfish gene terms. There are rare cancer syndromes in which one or other of the protective systems is faulty and people with those diseases get multiple cancers early and often die from them despite modern medicine.
Of course we forget that in our society cancer is a major cause of death in infants (albeit death is rare in the first year of life). In olden times many babies died of infectious diseases so the cancer death rate in that age group would not have been significant.
Also as mentioned earlier, misdiagnosis would have been common and syphilis, TB, and some fungal diseases could (and in the case of the last two still occasionally do) masquerade as cancer. It mattered little until recently as there was no cure for any of them.
Of course we forget that in our society cancer is a major cause of death in infants (albeit death is rare in the first year of life). In olden times many babies died of infectious diseases so the cancer death rate in that age group would not have been significant.
Also as mentioned earlier, misdiagnosis would have been common and syphilis, TB, and some fungal diseases could (and in the case of the last two still occasionally do) masquerade as cancer. It mattered little until recently as there was no cure for any of them.
Foppo said:
Isn't cancer supposed to be dorment in all of us?
Not as such but any cell will always have the capacity to mutate, for errors in the genetic code to go unfixed and become the start of cancer. (NB this is only a very basic undergraduate understanding of this stuff, a proper medical or biochemistry type could explain much better)BlackVanDyke said:
Not as such but any cell will always have the capacity to mutate, for errors in the genetic code to go unfixed and become the start of cancer. (NB this is only a very basic undergraduate understanding of this stuff, a proper medical or biochemistry type could explain much better)
I'm just finishing a works Oncology test now, so from my layman notes in the hope someone is interested. There's 3 sets of genes implicated in Carcinogenesis; Oncogenes, tumour suppressors, and DNA repair enzymes;1) The "Proto-oncogenes", a family of normal genes which code mostly for proteins involved in cell growth. These can mutate to form oncogenes, altering growth control. For example by producing elevated levels of a signalling protein. e.g. EGF, TGF, myc, ras.
2) The next family is the suppressors. These slow the growth, I was taught to consider these like the brakes. Where they are damaged or reduced in function, you cannot slow down the growth.
3) Last is DNA repair genes. Obviously if these f
k up then your proto-oncogense and tumour suppressors are in for a tough time because their coding is going to go to hell pretty quickly. This is particular an issue in some types of Colon cancer.One of the most important enzymes in pharmacology is the the cellular protein "P53". Among other important roles, P53 is a tumour supressor responsible for signalling cell death in the event of uncontrolled division. It basically signals the cell to commit "suicide", in a process called Apoptosis. Whilst oncology is multi-factorial, this is of critical importance, because if a cell ends itself before it can damage the whole, cancer can be prevented.
BlackVanDyke said:
Foppo said:
Isn't cancer supposed to be dorment in all of us?
Not as such but any cell will always have the capacity to mutate, for errors in the genetic code to go unfixed and become the start of cancer. Interesting point here, your immune system has evolved for approximately 40 years loyal service, after that it begins to fail. No wonder then that most cancers affect the over 40s.
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