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- Hacker News
- My mother smoked from age 12 until she was diagnosed with lung cancer at age 45. But the lung cancer was the result of metastasis from an advanced uterine cancer. A friend's mother, another long-time smoker, developed bladder cancer. Smoking's damage can manifest itself in multiple ways.by TomMasz
- Authors seemed to have considered genetic implications of the driver mutation and downstream effects, but there are considerations to be made ahead of this point too. This sort of damage for example is typically detected and repaired. The fidelity of that repair mechanism is liable to vary among the population for many reasons.by asdff
- As a millennial growing up it was beaten into our head that smoking was a death sentence. I recently looked up what the actual cancer rate among smokers was... about 125k people in the US die of lung cancer annual. 25 million people smoke annually. That is a 0.5% chance for occasional smokers. Even if you smoke a pack a day your entire life, the cancer rate is less than 15%.
I am in no way saying it is okay to smoke, there are obviously other health risks associated with it... but researching that made me feel much better about that one pack a year I buy for vacation.
by crims0n - Very common press release/headline meme: the question in the title of the article is literally never answered (or the opposite of the headline's claim is true). This research plainly DOES NOT explain why certain mice got cancer and others didn't, let alone why smoking/UV rays cause cancer in some humans but not others. There was no control group for exposed mice that would've allowed them to look at which biological differences made one group get tumors and the others not (the study doesn't appear to actually be interested in that question).
The language here is also pretty hyperbolic. We've known for decades that certain gene mutations cause increased cancer risk in the context of a certain genetic background (BRCA1/2, etc.). Using language like "for the first time" is just juvenile, or purposeful lying at worst.
by TaupeRanger - This is why Zinc is needed to prevent cancer[1].
The gene they are focusing on in the study [2] is Methylated-DNA--protein-cysteine methyltransferase (MGMT) and it needs zinc as a cofactor [3].
Not enough zinc, lower MGMT, and less DNA protection and repair.
Nutritional deficiencies and genetic differences increase the risk of cancer.
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12011-023-03818-6 [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10821-z [3] https://www.uniprot.org/uniprotkb/P16455/entry
by Noaidi - Anecdotally, whenever I go swimming with my kids in the summer, and I don't put sunscreen on right away, but let myself get some intense direct sun, I feel good and sleep really well that night.
As long as I don't let myself get in a red, sunburn situation.
by aantix - Even if smoking didnt cause cancer it would still be terrible.
6 months since i quit using nic gums.
- F* cancer. On my mother's side, her mom and sister died of breast cancer, her other sister caught it early, her brother died of cancer (throat or lung, not sure). She removed her breast 20 years ago at almost 50, went through chemo and radiotherapy, she was a survivor, cured. Just a month ago got headaches and turns out new brain tumor. Neurosurgeons removed it, but against all odds nothing to do with the old cancer, not a metastasis, but a new primary wildtype glial grade 4 tumor. It's just not fair.by dsego