can liver cancer develop almost purely from lifestyle decisions?

[MrCassdin]

say someone has no family history of cancer. they work a sedentary office job and dont make any attemp to walk around during break times. the diet consists of hot pockets and frozen pizza type foods and coca cola, every day. by age 35 this person has full blown liver cancer. is it reasonable to assume the cancer is a product of the lifestyle?

This can cause fatty liver disease but cancer, not sure about that.

 

[MrCassdin]

This is a point I would love to explore with its own thread thread on its own. Many brain tumors are from viral infections and there is 1 drug known to work but it is being used off testing and the pharma refuses to give samples for testing.



Seems we need to know more about these virus that give us FUCKING CANCER

Viral infection causes all kinds of problems. I know someone working on their Ph.D in infectious diseases that basically told me, almost all viruses are unknown or untreatable. People get them all the time and they cause blindness, organ failure, cancer too.

 

[IGBT]

alcohol / drugs / charcoal BBQ are among the many risk factors. Alcohol is a major risk factor. No safe exposure level with alcohol.

 

[CottonRabbit]

Must be Hep C. And yes, a person can get Hep C base on lifestyle (as in sleeping around).

Hep C is primarily transmitted through IV drug use, not sex. It's actually rather difficult to transmit it through sex. Hep C also only causes liver cancer as a secondary effect of it causing cirrhosis (permanent scarring of the liver). Chronic hep B on the other hand can directly cause liver cancer, even without cirrhosis. The majority of chronic hep B is passed through vertical transmission from mother to child. Hep B infection as an adult is usually completely cleared and leads to nothing more than an acute illness.

 

[Leyawiin]

Most with liver cancer that I've personally known or know of have been caused by cirrhosis brought on by Hepatitis. Most of the Hepatitis came from drug abuse at one point in their lives. This was the case with my older brother at least. He used various drugs in his 20s and then cleaned up his act (got married, "found Jesus" and went to church, bought a house, etc...). Twenty years later he was diagnosed with liver cancer after it was discovered he'd had Hep C eating away at his liver all those years. He was gone in eight months. My sister told me that at least five of his former friends/associates from his younger days either actively have liver cancer or have died from it. So yeah, at least with them if they hadn't been sticking needles in their arms at one point they wouldn't have gotten it.

 

[Scarpozzi]

Hep C is primarily transmitted through IV drug use, not sex. It's actually rather difficult to transmit it through sex. Hep C also only causes liver cancer as a secondary effect of it causing cirrhosis (permanent scarring of the liver). Chronic hep B on the other hand can directly cause liver cancer, even without cirrhosis. The majority of chronic hep B is passed through vertical transmission from mother to child. Hep B infection as an adult is usually completely cleared and leads to nothing more than an acute illness.

I know someone who got it years ago from a blood transfusion prior to hep c screening. They fought it for years and years and finally got a family member to donate part of their healthy liver... Both of them recovered and are doing well from the donation/transplant. There are a few different types of hep C and the kind they got was a more rare asian strain.

Also, there is supposed to be a recently approved hep C treatment that may be promising.

Back to the cancer stuff though...viral infection is pretty scary. There's a lot we don't know about viruses because if we're not symptomatic, we assume we're healthy... Quite a few of them go into remission or submission only to come back later and finish us off. I think it's kind of neat, but medicine has a long way to go. Until then, just live your life and enjoy every day you get before cancer, ebola, or aids gets you.

 

[darkswordsman17]

My uncle was pretty healthy, never smoked a cigarette or drank a drop of alcohol in his life and ended up with throat cancer. No history of it in the family either. Sometimes you just get a shitty hand dealt to you.

http://www.cdc.gov/std/hpv/stdfact-hpvandoropharyngealcancer.htm
http://www.webmd.com/sexual-conditi...hroat-cancer-may-have-telltale-first-symptoms

(Yes you can get throat cancer thanks to oral sex. It takes a long time to develop though.)

 

[CPA]

Yes. Majority of liver cancer is from a viral infection. Cirrhosis is also a cause, but he's entirely too young for that.

Shitty eating on its own is not a cause of cancer, much less liver cancer.

So, when "studies" were coming out several years ago about sugar substitutes causing cancer in rats, and possibly humans, that was actually from something else?

I'm not trying to be facetious, truly curious and trying to understand what can and can't cause cancer.

Found National Cancer Institute's response.

 

[NikolaeVarius]

So, when "studies" were coming out several years ago about sugar substitutes causing cancer in rats, and possibly humans, that was actually from something else?

I'm not trying to be facetious, truly curious and trying to understand what can and can't cause cancer.

That study was complete bullshit for several reasons. First being that 99% of studies done showed absolutely no correlation between artificial sweeteners and rates of cancer, but the media all jumped on this single study.

The amount of sweetener they were given was like the equivalent of like 70 cans of diet soda a day. But ignoring that fact, there was no control group to compare their results against, the breed of rat they used was a breed that was susceptible to getting bladder cancer in the first place (which is the type of cancer they got, and they didn't get it in any rate greater than average), cancer in rats doesn't mean that humans will get cancer the same way.

So yeah, the rats got bladder cancer because they're a breed genetically predispositioned to get that form of cancer.

There is no evidence linking artificial sweeteners with cancer at all.

 

[Gibsons]

Must be Hep C. And yes, a person can get Hep C base on lifestyle (as in sleeping around).

"must be," huh?

Because there are no other possibilities at all.