Fight Aging!

Cancer research is perhaps the field of medical science with the greatest level of funding and public support. The next generation of therapies presently under development are a great leap ahead in comparison to the present staples of chemotherapy and radiation therapy, making use of new tools in cellular biotechnology and promising accurate targeting of cancer cells for destruction with few side-effects. This is just as well, as life spans are lengthening now, and will continue to lengthen at an increasingly rapid pace in the future. That additional time brings with it the standard risk of suffering cancer at some point, which is large at this time since more people are living longer in a period of life that has high cancer risk due to the damage of aging.

Overall we should expect incidence of cancer to increase with the present trend towards longer life spans until better medical technologies become widely available, either rejuvenation treatments that repair cellular damage and restore tissue environments to a much lower, youthful risk of cancer, or which can control cancer sufficiently well so that the higher risk doesn't matter. The latter will probably emerge first. Either way, robust and reliable ways to control the risks of cancer are a very necessary part of any near future toolkit for rejuvenation and healthy life extension:

One in two people will develop cancer at some point in their lives, according to the most accurate forecast to date from Cancer Research UK. Thanks to research, the UK's cancer survival has doubled over the last 40 years and around half of patients now survive the disease for more than 10 years. But, as more people benefit from improved healthcare and longer life expectancy, the number of cancer cases is expected to rise. This new estimate replaces the previous figure, calculated using a different method, which predicted that more than 1 in 3 people would develop cancer at some point in their lives.

Age is the biggest risk factor for most cancers, and the increase in lifetime risk is primarily because more people are surviving into old age, when cancer is more common. "Cancer is primarily a disease of old age, with more than 60 per cent of all cases diagnosed in people aged over 65. If people live long enough then most will get cancer at some point. But there's a lot we can do to make it less likely - like giving up smoking, being more active, drinking less alcohol and maintaining a healthy weight. More than four in ten cancers diagnosed each year in the UK could be prevented by changes in lifestyle - that's something we can all aim for personally so that we can stack the odds in our favour. If we want to reduce the risk of developing the disease we must redouble our efforts and take action now to better prevent the disease for future generations."

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