Some people often think like this, "I don't smoke or drink, so I shouldn't get cancer, right?" I am here to answer you: "Unfortunately, this is not the case, even if you don't smoke or drink, it is still very possible to get cancer."

Why do we have cancer as a disease?

Our human body is composed of cells, large and small organs are composed of cells, the human body's cells are constantly renewed, the cells are also exposed to some harmful environment, such as ultraviolet lamps, haze, Hepatitis B virus, etc., which will lead to the human body's cells to undergo genetic mutation, of course, not all the mutations can lead to cancer, in fact, only the very key genes, in the appropriate location to mutate before the possibility of causing cancer. In fact, only very critical genes, which are mutated in the right place, can cause cancer. There are more than 30,000 genes in the human body, and only a few genes that are extremely relevant to cell division and proliferation can cause cancer, such as EGFR and ALK.

As long as we live long enough and are exposed to enough environmentally harmful factors, there is actually enough probability that we will produce cancer cells. There are statistics that say that each of us has produced many cancer cells at one time or another, only that most of these cells do not develop into cancer. This is mainly due to the monitoring and elimination of our body's immune system, in addition to the fact that cancer cells can't grow if they can't successfully induce blood vessels.

The pathogenesis of cancer is so intricate and complex that science has not yet fully elucidated it, and naturally there is no perfect means of preventing it. Many people put their hope on early diagnosis of cancer, but at present it is still a bit pessimistic, because our most advanced imaging technology such as PET-CT can only see 0.5 cm size tumor lesions, and PET-CT once to do 8000 to 10,000 yuan, with a certain degree of radiation, so this technology to do early diagnosis of tumors does not have the feasibility. The chest X-ray used in our routine medical checkups is meaningless for the detection of lung cancer, and cannot detect early lung cancer at all. A study confirms that low-dose spiral CT has early diagnostic value for patients at high risk of lung cancer, but it is also radioactive, so the current recommendation is to screen people over 65 years old who are at high risk of frequent smoking.

Imaging technology seems to have no hope for early diagnosis of tumors, at least not so far. A good strategy is molecular diagnosis, which examines tumor-associated proteins, gene mutations, and so on, at the molecular level, which is the hope for the future. As you can see below, at the cytological level, or the molecular level, it helps to detect the cancer early, and remove it at an earlier stage, before it has metastasized, to achieve a cure.

My own belief is that the future technology that will allow for early

phase diagnosis of tumors is the Exosome, or exosome. (If you are interested in learning about exosome, you can pay attention to WeChat public number: Cancer Degree, there is a detailed introduction, or you can chat with me privately)

Here, we need to make it clear that it is not just any molecule that can be used to do the early diagnosis of cancer, but it should be the aggregation of a lot of signals to carry out a systematic classification, so as to do the early diagnosis. So a lot of online said, draw blood a few minutes to diagnose cancer are fooling people.

Cancer is a class of diseases, in addition to hair and nails, other organs of the human body may occur cancer, how to have a molecule can predict cancer, and you know that there is cancer, but also can not know which organ occurred ah, so to do the diagnosis of cancer and accurate localization, must be the need for more than one molecular diagnostic data parameter indicators, so the future of the early diagnosis of cancer must be a big! So the future early diagnosis of cancer must be a big data thing. It is reported that the United States Anderson Cancer Research Center and many other institutions are currently engaged in exosome-based cancer early diagnosis research. In the future, it will even be possible to modify these exosomes, load them with drugs and attack cancer as suicide missiles.

We humans may not be able to escape cancer after all, because it's an evolutionary disease. But there should be many ways to do this in the future, including early cancer diagnosis. Currently there is no way, even with hereditary oncogene variants it is not a certainty that you will get cancer (e.g. Angelina Jolie's BRCA mutation), and the absence of hereditary gene variants is not a high priority, as 90% of all cancers are not hereditary. So we still have to look forward to big data on exosomes, and metabolomics and many other parametric indicators, so as to solve the problem of cancer diagnosis, treatment and prognosis monitoring.

It seems to be a bit off-topic to answer the question on the topic, what are the triggers of cancer?

Smoking and air pollution are the main triggers for the high incidence of lung cancer

In our daily life, people feel shocked and afraid when cancer is mentioned. So what causes cancer?

Research has shown that obesity is related to breast cancer and prostate cancer; staying up late can cause disruption of the biological clock and a decline in immune function, which makes leukemia, breast cancer and prostate cancer easy to find; sedentary people have a 40% to 50% higher likelihood of suffering from colon cancer than those who exercise regularly; and being in a state of exuberance and tension over a long period of time is an important reason for causing breast cancer and ovarian cancer.

Smoking and air pollution are the main triggers for the high incidence of lung cancer, whose mortality rate has risen by 465 percent over the past 30 years, making it the most lethal malignant tumor. Currently, there are more than 315 million smokers in China, and the number is still increasing. Nearly half of Chinese men smoke, and lung cancer accounts for 30 percent of cancer deaths.

Cheng Shujun, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said that in the past 20 years, the incidence of lung cancer in China has been maintained at a high rate of growth, so that now China's lung cancer is in the first place in terms of both incidence data and death data, which is the most serious challenge facing the prevention and treatment of tumors at present.

Nearly 90% of cancers are caused by lifestyle and environmental factors

Dr. Schroeder, the WHO representative in China, said that the number of cancers and cancer-related deaths in China is rising at an alarming rate every year, but the real tragedy is that the majority of these cases could have been prevented. The causes of the growing number of cancers in China are largely due to risk factors that can be intervened.

Big data on cancer suggests that close to 90 percent of all cancers can be traced back to lifestyle, environmental factors, and only 10-30 percent can be attributed to genetic mutations. Controlling smoking can reduce cancer-related deaths by 23-25 percent; for stomach, liver and cervical cancers, controlling chronic infections can reduce deaths by 29 percent. Experts emphasized that early diagnosis and treatment of cancer is especially critical, such as early screening that can reduce the death rate of cervical cancer in women by 80 percent, and an early breast cancer cure rate of more than 90 percent.

So what we can do at the moment is to have a healthy lifestyle that can greatly reduce the risk of developing cancer. According to long-term research on lung cancer, avoiding smoking is still the best way to reduce the risk of lung cancer, and you can read the article on the public number of CancerDo's WeChat for detailed data on this. Long-term alcohol abuse may increase the risk of lung cancer, and abstaining from alcohol can effectively reduce the incidence of many cancers, such as liver cancer and stomach cancer.