[HN Gopher] The risk of cancer fades past the age of 80
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The risk of cancer fades past the age of 80
Author : gpi
Score : 137 points
Date : 2024-12-22 16:25 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sciencealert.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sciencealert.com)
| nikolay wrote:
| Ageing itself is a anti-cancer strategy...
| JackFr wrote:
| Like the old joke - growing old sucks but it beats the
| alternative.
| api wrote:
| This is an explicit hypothesis I have heard: that aging arises
| in part from a compromise between longevity and not getting
| cancer. Obviously an immortal who gets a bunch of tumors is not
| immortal.
|
| That cancer cell lines are often immortal is interesting
| circumstantial evidence for this.
|
| Telomere shortening for example is hypothesized as one stop
| mechanism for runaway cell division.
|
| My bet would be that this is part of the answer but not the
| whole answer. Biological systems rarely have one part match one
| function. Biology is not "designed" the way humans design
| things.
| f6v wrote:
| There's cellular senescence that helps control the
| malignancies. Then we have an increase in senescent cell
| burden with age. Of course, you can put two and two together
| and say that aging protects from cancer. But that's a wild
| jump. For one thing, we can't prove there's any kind of
| (evolutionary) benefit in controlling tumors in older age.
| corysama wrote:
| I've heard that hair going grey is a cancer mitigation
| strategy.
| filoleg wrote:
| Do you have any additional info on this?
|
| I am not saying you are wrong, I don't know, but I know
| that hair becomes grey due to decreased melanin production
| in your hair follicles as people age.
|
| So the natural conclusion based on what you are saying
| (assuming it is true) is that the decrease of melanin
| production in hair follicles reduces the risk of cancer.
| How so?
| robocat wrote:
| There's also some details about how stem cell divide. Stem
| cells exist just so that they can be clean copies.
|
| I read a paper about the depth of the tree of division of
| stem cells that also backs up the aging-is-side-effect-of-
| fighting-cancer. Sorry, I don't remember paper title or
| better keywords.
| hgomersall wrote:
| This is super interesting. I've been wondering for a while about
| the role of iron in health, with consideration of things like the
| influence of the iron scavenger P. gingivalis. I do wonder if
| iron is the real reason for red meat being associated with worse
| health outcomes.
| voisin wrote:
| I believe Dr Greger (well known vegan doctor who provides
| research support for his claims) has some videos on this.
| hgomersall wrote:
| I'm happy to accept I'm talking complete nonsense if I know my
| error, so presuming those that downvote this response have some
| insight I don't, I'd really appreciate them sharing.
| flawn wrote:
| Can you elaborate what iron does in that context? It has a bad
| effect?
| begueradj wrote:
| This is against any established biological common sense I heard
| of: telomeres are known to be the mechanics of the DNA.
|
| The enemy of these telomeres is age: damage occurs to them during
| cell division, hence the part of the DNA which watches after the
| DNA is no longer to fulfill its duty: and that is an open door to
| all types of cancer.
|
| In other words, if nothing kills you at old age, cancer will do
| it.
| jacoblambda wrote:
| That's not entirely accurate. Telomeres shorten with age but
| cancers generally are triggered by mutations or defects much
| further in the DNA away from the telomeres.
|
| So one hypothesis is that telomeres shrink with age which
| causes runaway growth (i.e. cancer) to burn up all it's
| telomeres early and start crunching through sequences
| responsible for building proteins essential to life, therefore
| causing some of the cancer cells to die out. Whether that
| hypothesis holds is a different matter but the referenced paper
| points towards various other mechanisms which are seemingly
| caused by cell age as well.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Well thats why I read the article instead of just the headline.
|
| tl;dr low iron causes less cell cycle activity. which means
| less errors including deregulation which is what cancer is.
|
| its not that ground breaking.
|
| but the iron contribution is. its actually a bit clickbait
| because they focus more on increasing iron in old people to
| prompt better recovery of everything else.
| cgh wrote:
| When you read the article, did this argument occur to you in
| light of what they found with NUPR1?
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > telomeres are known to be the mechanics of the DNA.
|
| > The enemy of these telomeres is age: damage occurs to them
| during cell division, hence the part of the DNA which watches
| after the DNA is no longer to fulfill its duty: and that is an
| open door to all types of cancer.
|
| This sounds a little off. Telomeres aren't known to be the
| mechanics of anything. They fulfill their role by existing.
|
| Imagine if, whenever you copied a file, the copy was missing
| the first and last 40 bytes of the original. (And, for
| completeness, those 80 bytes are also removed from the
| original.) That's how DNA copying works - a little bit of the
| beginning of the strand, and a little bit of the end, aren't
| copied and don't exist in the new copies.
|
| Telomeres address this problem by existing in large numbers at
| the beginning and end of DNA strands ( _telos_ being Greek for
| "end"), providing padding that can be omitted from copies
| without hurting the organism. The creation of gametes involves
| refilling the worn-out telomeres of the parent organism so that
| the infant who eventually develops will have a full complement.
| But you don't do the same thing for your own cells, so
| eventually your cells try to divide, eat into their own DNA,
| and die.
|
| Because cancer cells divide quickly, this mechanism will
| quickly kill them. So cancers also need to be able to refill
| their own telomeres. That's one of the mutations necessary for
| a cancer to originate.
|
| But you'll note that a loss of function in the telomeres
| doesn't leave the door open for cancer. For cancer, you need to
| _restore_ the telomeres.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Telomeres are anti-cancer. Cells can only divide a limited
| number of times before the telomeres run out. The cost is a
| loss of vitality (senescence) as the individual cells end up
| being older since they aren't able to divide and renew.
| marinmania wrote:
| I haven't heard this before - the change isn't that large but but
| it really does drop after 80
|
| My inclination is that this could still just be a selection
| effect. For people who are prone to cancer, you are probably dead
| by 80.
|
| https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/a...
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| 85 year olds die from cancer like 70 year olds but still over
| twice the rate of a 55 year old.
|
| Hardly a consolation.
|
| The other thing to consider is that once you get to 85, you're
| likely to die from just about everything else, not just heart
| disease and cancer.
| paulpauper wrote:
| science reporting is pretty bad. unsubstantiated, weak, or
| wrong claims are hyped up .
| hinkley wrote:
| Mr Burns: so what you're saying is, I'm indestructible!
|
| Doctor: Oh no, and in fact even a slight breeze could k...
|
| Mr Burns: Innndestructibllllle.
| marinmania wrote:
| Fwiw this is a graph of being diagnosed with cancer, not
| dying.
| mdavidn wrote:
| Could this be an artifact of how we measure cancer? My own
| grandfather probably had cancer when he died, but so much
| else wasn't working that I think the docs just didn't bother
| testing for cancer or diagnosing it. Treatment would not
| improve his prognosis at that point.
| earnestinger wrote:
| I've heard from medical student, that at later age cancer
| is less risky due to slower overall metabolism. Not a
| fertile environment for cancer to grow.
| justlikereddit wrote:
| Medical students often miss the fine nuances, I would
| know, I used to be one.
|
| Cancer at a later age, like at 85, is "less risky",
| because you'll be likely to die of something else than
| the cancer before you're 90 anyway.
|
| Cancer at a later age, like 60, is "less risky" because
| your body have had plenty of time to grow indolent and
| lazy cancers by then, and your immune system is winding
| down, letting them bloom up a bit.
|
| Cancer at like 30, while many are treatable nowadays, is
| usually bad news as why are you having cancer at 30 of
| your genes aren't massively prone to spawn cancer or you
| had some environmental exposure to serious mutagens.
|
| But even in the older age categories there's plenty of
| really nasty cancers that lead to ugly deaths, which is
| why I don't like generalizations like this.
| gitaarik wrote:
| Isn't it simply because these people won't ever get cancer, and
| so they die of something else. So if you reach a certain age
| you outlive most people that would die from cancer.
|
| And then always researchers try to find a clue in the patient
| and see like oh hey they have more iron, iron must be the
| solution, but maybe the person just didn't get cancer because
| (s)he had a healthy lifestyle and relatively little stress.
| mynegation wrote:
| For everyone in disbelief like I was: "... past the age of 80
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >What emerged was higher levels of a protein called NUPR1 in the
| older mice. This caused cells to act as if they were deficient in
| iron, which in turn limited their regeneration rates - putting
| restrictions on both healthy growth and cancerous tumors. ...
| "Aging cells lose their capacity for renewal and therefore for
| the runaway growth that happens in cancer."
|
| Translating that to normalspeak: Lower metabolism leads to lower
| incidence of cancer.
|
| It sounds like common sense to me; cancers form from damage and
| mutations to DNA during cell replication (kind of like uncaught
| bitflips during file copy operations), so the less replication
| there is (lower metabolism) the lower the risk of cancer and vice
| versa.
|
| Also for some sort of related anecdata: My mother passed from
| stomach cancer, she had a lifelong chronic iron deficiency due to
| underperformant hemoglobins which she compensated for by taking
| iron supplements. Towards the end she ended up getting some iron
| infusions because her blood iron levels were so abysmally low.
| qqqult wrote:
| isn't it just lower MTOR activity = lower risk of cancer?
|
| as we age we eat less, move less which slows down MTOR
| snek_case wrote:
| Our cells also probably just don't divide as fast anymore. The
| entire metabolism slows down.
| dietr1ch wrote:
| Which to my straw man's understanding is also why cancer in
| young people is more likely to go out of control and seems to
| be more lethal than on older people.
| mlok wrote:
| Misleading title. This is true about 5-10% of the human life. For
| 90-95% of the human life, the exact opposite is happening.
|
| More honest title : "The risk of Cancer Fades Over 80 Years Old,
| and We May Know Why."
| pama wrote:
| The risk of getting diagnosed with cancer fades over 80 years
| old. Tumor cells might take many years, or decades to develop
| into a diagnosable form of cancer, so much of the story relates
| to things that happen well before the 80+ years detection date.
| dang wrote:
| We've made the title more specific now.
| 3000 wrote:
| its a dying host and the xenomorph cant be bothered probably
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