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Friday, January 13. 2012

The overwhelmingly largest risk factor for cancer and heart disease

Is age. Bad luck probably comes in second:



This is something that gets obscured in today's medical reporting--everyone, as they get older, will get sick for some reason and die at some point. The biggest risk factor for heart disease and cancer isn't BMI, cholesterol, blood pressure, etc....it's age. And to a large extent, the incidence of those diseases is random; doing everything right lowers your risk of disease, but not to zero, and usually not to that small a fraction of the risk for the general population.


Posted by Dr. Joy Bliss in Medical, Our Essays at 17:05 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)

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The point is not to live forever or reduce risks.
It's to slow aging to extend healthy life. That would provide more time for further slowing.
Because the human body is the most-complex system of systems we know of, it will take time.
The good news is that slowing is already underway.
The bad news is that current adults probably won't live long enough to reap the benefits.
Sniff.
#1 PacRim Jim (Link) on 2012-01-13 17:15 (Reply)
More than smoking? I'd like to see the numbers, at least.
#2 John David Galt on 2012-01-14 01:18 (Reply)
Roughly half of us will die of heart disease, half from some cancer, and the rest from various old age diseases (ie infection, respiratory failure, etc)

Gotta die from something.

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/lcod.htm
#2.1 Bird Dog on 2012-01-14 07:54 (Reply)
Nick Lane argues that the unifying underlying syndrome is your mitochondria wearing out. If we could find some way to address that, with pristine copies of the original mitochondrial DNA, we'd be taking a stab at all of the age-related infirmities at once, rather than trying to treat all the symptoms piecemeal.
#3 Texan99 (Link) on 2012-01-14 10:35 (Reply)

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