Americans could prevent roughly half of all cancer deaths by doing these four things

By Melissa Healy of the LA Times. The report is from the journal JAMA Oncology. Excerpts: 

"Roughly half of cancer deaths in the United States could be prevented or forestalled if all Americans quit smoking, cut back on drinking, maintained a healthful weight and got at least 150 minutes of exercise each week, according to a new report.

These same measures would also reduce the number of new cancer diagnoses by 40% to 70%.

For men, universal embrace of this lifestyle could avert or delay 67% of cancer deaths and prevent 63% of new malignancies each year, researchers calculated. If all of the nation’s women did the same, their yearly cancer mortality rates would fall by 59% and new cancers would drop 41%."

"healthful lifestyles could cut into a disease that will claim the lives of 600,000 Americans this year and upend the lives of 1.6 million by turning them into newly diagnosed patients."

The effect of a healthful lifestyle varied according to gender and cancer type. For instance, women who followed the strictures on smoking, drinking, weight and exercise could reduce their lung cancer risk by 85% and their colorectal cancer risk by 60%. For men, the corresponding figures were 90% and 50%.

The researchers also calculated that women who took good care of themselves could reduce their risk of pancreatic cancer by 53%, endometrial cancer by 37%, ovarian cancer by 34% and breast cancer by 15%.

For men, a healthful lifestyle could mean a 62% reduction in bladder cancer risk, a 40% reduction in prostate cancer risk and a 36% reduction in kidney cancer risk, according to the study.
 
The study’s findings present a significant challenge to research published last year that said as many as 80% of cancers might be attributable to factors beyond the control of individuals — the “bad luck” hypothesis. Instead, the new research offers evidence that bad behavior trumps bad luck as a cause of cancer."

"“Primary prevention should remain a priority for cancer control,” wrote the study authors, Drs. Mingyang Song and Edward Giovannucci.

"“As a society, we need to avoid procrastination induced by thoughts that chance drives all cancer risk or that new medical discoveries are needed to make gains against cancer,” wrote Dr. Graham A. Colditz and Siobhan Sutcliffe of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Instead, they wrote, “we must embrace the opportunity to reduce the collective cancer toll by … changing the way we live.”

Efforts to promote those changes, they added, “will be our fastest return on past investments in cancer research over the coming decades.”"