A major, major new study from Johns Hopkins may have unraveled what causes the most common 32 types of cancer.

The punch line is that cancer is mostly caused by random error, not environmental toxins, not genes.

What is Cancer?

Despite the bewildering complexity of this disease, all cancers share exactly the same underlying definition:

Cancer is the proliferation of cells whose growth has gone wild and which are able to spread in the body.

Two features define all cancer:  wild growth, spread.

To help understand this think about bacteria.  They can never have cancer.  If a single-celled form of life grows like wild, there are just more of them, no disease.  In fact, the only reason bacteria shouldn’t grow like wildfire is if they don’t have enough food.

For all of us in the multi-cellular world, our zillions of cells have to cooperate for the body to live.

Each human has 10 trillion cells, and every single one has to grow according to a very strict plan, or the whole project collapses.

In a fully grown person, all cartilage, heart, brain nerve, and several other type of cells have to agree to never divide and reproduce.  They are to stay put and do their job, for a lifetime.

Other cells, like skin, gut, lining of the airways, bone marrow cells have to divide and grow.  Consider our skin, it replaces itself entirely every 3 weeks!  No dividing and growing, no new skin in 3 weeks.

But the dividing and growing of such renewing tissues must be under very strict control, like a 10 trillion member symphony orchestra.  Imagine the clarinets going from 2 in an orchestra, to 200, it would ruin the music and cause its mission to collapse.

And what about spread?  If one cell decides simply to grow without end and not spread, that is a lump, not a cancer.  Spread means that errant cell and all its billions of descendants can travel around the body and like little seeds, stop and grow whereever, this is what metastasis is.

So What Makes a Civilized Cell become a Cancer Cell?

Most of us would think that two big reasons go into making a cell go cancerous.

Genes

It’s our DNA that directs the normal operations of our 10 trillion cell symphony orchestra, so it makes sense that it would be our genes that cause cancer.

That turns out to be absolutely correct, every cause of cancer, at some point, must act by altering our genes.

But by genetic causes, we usually mean a gene present at birth, inherited across generations.  There are such, the most famous being the BRCA genes, that clearly cause breast and ovarian cancers.

The analysis of cause done at Johns Hopkins found that across all 32 of the most common cancers, such genes caused a grand total of 5% of all these cancers.

Now, for some cancers the role played by inherited genes is bigger.  Clearly this is the case for breast cancer.

For others, inherited genes play essentially no role, ever, such as lung cancer.

But in no cancer are inherited genes the main cause of cancer in people.

Environmental Poisons and Dangerous Foods

Even here, the gene still is the mechanism.  The single greatest environmental poison that causes cancer is tobacco.  But in every case of tobacco caused cancer, the mechanism of how the tobacco causes the cancer is via an impact on the tobacco user’s genes.

Although all environmental poisons act via a toxic impact on genes, it is still the case that without an exposure to that environmental poison, that cancer would not have occurred.

The analysis of cause done at Johns Hopkins found that across all 32 of the most common cancers, environmental poison caused an impressive 29% of all these cancers.

For more than any other cause, the type of cancer has a huge variance on how often environmental poisons cause it.

Again, the number one cancer from environmental poison is lung cancer.   About 65% of all lung cancers come from environmental poison, mainly tobacco.

But prostrate, brain, and bone cancers have almost no known environmental poison as a cause.

There is a major national effort to define just which environmental poisons cause cancer.   In the most stark contrast to the other two causes of cancer, only this cause has inspired massive political and industry-backed resistance to protect our lives.

Again tobacco serves as an excellent example.  Tobacco causes about 500,000 deaths in America every year, not because of some tragic reality, but because we have all agreed it’s OK to grow and sell it.  Quite massive amounts of money have been devoted to making sure our nation never changes its mind on this.

Sadly, the same sort of opposition to preventing cancer from other environmental poisons is quite active in our country today.

29% of all cancer is at our own hands, why not eliminate about a third of human cancer by agreeing to no longer accept the manufacture, sale, and release of such environmental poisons that cause cancer?

Mistakes in the Gene’s Copy Machine

Most of us have a pretty good idea what it means to inherit a gene, or be exposed to a poison.

But the #1 cause of cancer in humans is the result of a very little known mechanism in our biology: gene copying.

It turns out if you want to have more than one cell, you have to copy the instruction manual for every cell to work.

Think about how all of us started, as one fertilized egg.  That one cell contains all of the DNA sequence, really instructions, that any of our cells will ever have.

To go from our early moments as one cell, to our now proud moments as a walking, talking collection of 10 trillion cells, that egg, and every one of its descendants has to divide about 43 times.

More challenging, tissues that renew themselves, like skin or the lining of the gut and lung and bone marrow, must have cells divide all the time to keep up the supply.

Every time one cell divides, it must copy its entire DNA string, otherwise the new cell will be living without proper instructions.  And, remember that our 10 trillion cell body is an exquisite symphony?  Every* cell in it must have a complete set of identical instruction codes, in order for this 10 trillion orchestra to play the right tune.

Now, our DNA has about 3 billion individual bits of information in it.   If you took a test with 3 billion questions on it, and got a score of 99.9% you would get an A, but that poor cell that got the answers right 99.9% of the time, would still have 300 million mistakes!

Remember, that for our body to work, every single cell must stay put or divide with an excruciating degree of accuracy in position and timing.

So, if you mess up copying the working instructions of a cell, its DNA, a common consequence is that the instructions about when to stay put, and when to divide get messed up.

For cancer to actually happen, for an otherwise nice, well-behaved cell to become one that never stops growing and able to seed across the body and grow always wherever, takes more than one mistake in the DNA copy machine.  Usually 2 or 3.

DNA is living cells is copied with truly staggering accuracy.  In humans, there are only about 130 errors, in a lifetime!  That is, we copy our 3 billion bits of information across all the cell divisions of a lifetime with only 130 mistakes.  Almost perfect.

But not quite, those mistakes account for a truly surprising proportion of cancer.

The analysis of cause done at Johns Hopkins found that across all 32 of the most common cancers, gene copying errors caused an impressive 66% of all these cancers.

Again, environmental poisons and of course inherited genes cause cancer by altering our genes, but a full 2/3 of all human cancers are due to quite random errors in the copying process itself, not by the alteration of DNA from environmental poison, or by the fixed danger of a cancer causing gene inherited.

Again, the for some cancers the role played by random copying errors is much higher.

Pancreatic cancer is caused by such random errors in 77% of cases.

That proportion is at its highest for three cancers:  a full 95% of prostate, brain, and bone cancer are from random copying errors.

BOTTOM LINES

1. Cancer is one of the top 3 dominant diseases of humanity, every family has suffered its tragedies and challenges, we all worry about it.
2. A major new study of just what exactly causes all human cancers has found that two thirds of our cancers are due to random errors in how our cells divide and copy their DNA.  This means that a strong majority of cancers, and in some cases like brain, bone, and prostate cancer, nearly all, is not our fault.   They are in reality truly random events that cannot be predicted, caused, or prevented.   http://hub.jhu.edu/2017/03/23/cancer-mutations-caused-by-random-dna-mistakes/
3. Environmental poisons still play a big role, causing about 29% of all human cancer.  Tobacco is number one.  But millions of people get cancer in the US every year because industry refuses to stop the manufacture and distribution (by sale or pollution) of environmental poisons known to cause cancer.  It has to stop.
4. Perhaps one of the most feared causes of cancer, a gene inherited, causes only 5% of all human cancer.  That is still a lot, but not nearly as much as randomness or environmental poison.
5. Medical science is 100% committed to making cancer like an ear infection.  Once deadly, now harmless.  To make that happen, it is clear that we must:
   1. Eliminate any known environmental poison that cause cancer from continuing to poison us.
   2. Find a way to cure cancers.  That can be done by plucking them out very early as in cervical and colon cancer preventive practices (pap smear and colonscopy, respectively), or by finding new cures that can rid our bodies of more established cancers.
6.  Very, very importantly, most cancers are no one’s fault.  They are not caused by what we eat, drink, think, do, or don’t do.

Cancer is scary, these new findings really help put the causes into perspective, releasing so many of us from any guilt, pointing all of us in the right direction to end this scourge.

To your health,
Dr. Arthur Lavin