Diet, Environment, Behaviour and Cancer

Cancer is the third most leading cause of deaths after cardiovascular diseases and infectious/ parasitic diseases. The over all death rate has remained the same since 1930...... ( depending on population statistics ). Till date we dont have answers to basic questions in cancer growth, we still use biopsies for classifying tumor origin and staging despite of all our advancements with scanning and imaging technologies, and we still are almost helpless in case the tumor is malignant and is metastatized. Even worse for some typical tumor types we cant even do better for eg the pancreatic cancers that are highly invasive and survival rate is <5%. There have been recent correlations of neoplastic growth along with the environmental factors and dietary patterns. This come into the limelight after analysing the geographical distribution of certain types of cancers. For e.g Gall bladder cancer is ighly abundant in south east Asia......India , Srilanka, Pakistan , parts of China where as its totally absent from the American continent. Similarly the pattern for the breast cancer is almost opposite..... the western countries show more elevated rates for the breast carcinomas due to decline in the breast feeding compared to eastern countries. Carcinomas of lung also show distribution dependent upon smoking and pollution levels in the different regions.... particularly in the developed countries of the world.

These all links and alot many more draw attention towards the neoplastic growth related to our dietary patterns, social behaviour patterns and attributed to the environmental causes..... Almost half of the world's total dedicated reeach is conducted on the cancer and still we are far from the Light ...... WHO data analysis says that by 2020 cancer will be the leading cause of deaths worldwide and is planning to declare cancer a global disease.

Isn't it the time for the coordination of the people working in different regions of the world to come along together and start visualizing the cancer as not lung carcinoma, breast carcinoma , ovarian carcinoma ( which is most essential for patient's life and cure ) but as only carcinoma and then see what went wrong in all these common points and more imortanly what caused these healthy cells to turn neoplastic and then try and figure out the role of the extrinsic factors and then progress further in tissue types and specificity in prognostics, diagnostics and finally the treatment.