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Interesting article challenging today's popular understanding of cancer genesis and development, and outlining the increasing understanding of the role inflammation plays in stimulating the growth of cancer cell populations.
> The discovery that chronic inflammation can provide the impetus for cancers to develop is forcing clinicians to rethink their approach to the disease’s prevention.

Alternative health has been saying this for decades. Ketogenic diets + medicinal plants/mushrooms can do a lot, even after the fact.

I will again mention my favorite cancer champions, the bats.

Bats very rarely get cancer (I tried to find the actual # of verified cases of cancers in bats, but came up short), and they have a lot of anti-cancer adaptations in their genome.

They are also really good at taming inflammation and activity of various viruses. That helps them survive infection with rabies - their systems just don't react as aggresively to the infection as ours (and most mammals') do.

This may help them against cancer as well. Not just p53 et al.

> This, says Dr Balmain, suggests that 80-90% of carcinogens which people are exposed to may not induce mutations.

Tell me the 10% of which are dangerous so that i can avoid them

I’ve been reading a lot lately about the negative effects of inflammation. Recently, I came across an article arguing that it’s inflammation in the blood vessels (not cholesterol itself) that causes cardiovascular problems.

Now this article blaming inflammation for cancer.

But isn’t inflammation also a useful and necessary process in the body? If it’s so harmful, should we all be taking anti-inflammatory drugs? Of course, those have their own downsides too (my doctor mentioned that ibuprofen can even affect hearing).

As a person who studied cancer, I am probably not this article's audience.

That said, I feel the need to point out that chronic inflammation has long been known to be one of the roots of cancer. Chronic inflammation can be caused by a few things but common among them is the immune system.

The framing of the article, in my quick skim, felt like it was insinuating that researchers believed that cancer arises from mutations alone, and that everyone assumed carcinogens were all mutagens.

I haven't read the paper this article is describing. It seems very interesting. But the headline and the article makes it seem like some major turning point or ground shift which IMHO it is not.

Don’t think I’ve seen “discovering”, the present participle of the verb, used in a headline like this before.
Discovery? HA! Traditional Chinese Medicine already knew the body cures cancer by boosting the immune system. Did they no how? Who cares?

Harnessing the power of traditional Chinese medicine monomers and compound prescriptions to boost cancer immunotherapy

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10684919/

Antitumor effects of immunity-enhancing traditional Chinese medicine

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31710893/

Edit: Please comment on what is wrong if you will downvote this because I am open to discussion and correction.

Modern society only patents things that were already known and then makes them out of reach for the common man.

This sounds like an application of ML. But we can't call it ML anymore right? Need to call it AI in the media whenever possible.
Article appears to be a word:

These non-mutagenic carcinogens instead seem to the body’s immune system.

I suspect "seem to target" or "seem to trigger" was intended.

(The Economist's editing is usually superb, this is a pretty glaring error.)

Cancer is a hard problem. It has deeper interconnected mechanisms long before any inflammation or observable change. Cancer is caused due to slow incremental addition of DNA mutations that lead to cell division control failure. This first step is intractable to reverse. All the next stages just lead to early or late diagnosis.
This first step is intractable to reverse

Why?

Is this related to chronic inflammation from glucose spikes?