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[Nickmark59]

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[Swede]

Probably the truth. Why do you find that an insult? And to whom?

[Nickmark59]

Could have used better terminology to explain it

[MamaN]

I saw this story on cbs news tonight and I found it interesting . It's all about cell turnover,in the cbs article it say the large intestines have a much higher cell turn over. More chances of cell mutations.

[weisssoccermom]

I read the article yesterday online. Unlike you, I have the opposite opinion.....certainly I don't see it as an 'insult' but rather as a vindication of sorts that cancer patients didn't 'cause' or 'do anything' to get cancer. Certainly we all understand that there are certain cancers that definitely can be 'caused' by things like cigarette smoking, etc. but for most of us, it doesn't matter. We got cancer, we deal with it and we don't need to be hearing from people that we did or didn't do something that 'caused' us to get this disease. It is, as the study suggest, just bad luck!

[jillbugs4110]

My oncologist says it is bad luck for me all the time....i agree I did everything to stay healthy worked out no alcohol ate healthy none of this mattered.

[Carolinabluetec]

I suppose that I got Cancer the old fashioned way, I earned it with bad habits. or bad luck.

[Val*pal]

Nick, I think you misinterpreted the article. My husband's doctor told him a couple of times that his cancer acquisition was "bad luck". And, in my estimation, it was.

No one can say precisely what causes cancer (except for the inherited strains and the exposure to known carcinogens). Everything that I've read states that it's probably the unfortunate result of several things, but definitely involves the rogue mutations of our body cells. We'd all like to think that X was the cause, but it's highly unlikely that it is just one factor. My husband did not drink alcohol, never smoked, ate a reasonably healthy diet, and had no known family history of cancer, but he got it all the same. He may have had some environmental risk in that he worked for 34 years at a diesel engine manufacturing plant; however, he was a statistician in an office at the plant, supposedly removed from possible fumes, but he did sit under an air vent for most of those 34 years. Perhaps that was one trigger that unfortunately met up with some other random results. I'm sure I'll never know.

Danny struggled to make sense of why it happened to him for the first year or so, but he came to accept its randomness. He'd also experienced a random brain aneurysm when he was 23 which he managed to survive with only moderate physical impairment, so I think he knew that bad things happen for apparently no reason at an early age.

Perhaps in the future science will be able to map cancer's origins more precisely, but for now we just have to accept that it's most likely the result of several influences that sadly come together to form those terrible fast growing cells.

All I know is that cancer took my husband much too early, and I miss him more with each passing day. He was such a kind person.

[radnyc]

This is not an accurate reading of this finding, it seems, the writer of the article might be just trying to drum up mouse clicks. I had to read the article twice and read the actual abstract of the study to get a good sense of it; link: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/347/6217/78.abstract

The following link to another article gives a good description of the real aim of the study:

http://gu.com/p/44hjb/sbl

What I do get from it is that in colorectal cancer, colon tissue stem cells divide at greater rates than in other parts of the intestine, thus the cancer is more common in the colon.