In the family, some people have tumors, which bring not only mental blows but also uneasiness to others-some people say that tumors are inherited, some people in the family have tumors, and others will suffer from the same diseases one after another.
Is this really the case?
How hereditary is the tumor?
If there are tumor patients in the family, should we pay attention to some what?
Why do you get tumors?
The pathogenic factors of tumor can be divided into environmental factors and hereditary factors.
Environmental factors: refer to the acquired personal living environment (habits such as diet, smoking and drinking, virus infection, contact with harmful substances, etc.), which cause gene mutation and cause tumor.
Hereditary factors: is the parents bring you genetic characteristics. Hereditary tumor is the most prominent manifestation of family cancer history, through a large number of epidemiological studies show that cancer patients lineal blood relatives suffering from the same kind of cancer probability is significantly greater than normal people.
Therefore, tumors are [hereditary]. This also makes many friends feel uneasy-is there a tumor patient in my family, and sooner or later I will suffer from tumors?
With a family history of tumors, what is the probability of tumor occurrence?
Many people’s consciousness of [heredity] is nothing more than [parents with double eyelids, the children they give birth to are basically double eyelids], or [parents with blood types of O and AB respectively, will not give birth to children of AB] and so on. However, the heredity of tumors is not so simple.
Let’s give a simple example:
Esophageal cancer is a polygenic disease. Studies have shown that people with a family history of esophageal cancer are 2-3 times more likely to suffer from esophageal cancer than the general population.
So how much is the probability of ordinary people suffering from esophageal cancer? Take Henan, Shanxi, Hebei and other high-risk areas in our country as an example, the incidence rate is about one in 1,000. That is to say, even if there are relatives in the family suffering from esophageal cancer, their incidence rate is about 2/3 per thousand.
But clinically, we do see that several people in a family have tumors at the same time. The reason is that they have the same living environment and similar living habits. For example, if the whole family likes to drink hot tea, then they are all at risk of esophageal cancer.
Good living environment and habits are the key to cancer prevention!
At the beginning of the article, it was mentioned that tumors are caused by environmental factors and heredity. In fact, the two also have synergistic effects.
Is what synergistic? It is that two factors can promote the occurrence of a thing respectively. If the two factors exist at the same time, the combined effect is greater than the sum of the effects of the two independent factors. In short, it is 1 + 1 > 2!
In other words, what is inherited from cancer patients is probably [sensitivity to carcinogenic effects in the environment], that is, facing the same carcinogenic factors, they are more vulnerable to stimulation and mutation.
Let’s give another simple example:
Some studies have shown that the risk of lung cancer increases for first-class family members (parents, children and brothers and sisters) with tumor history. At the same time, some studies have shown that the more smokers accumulate, the greater the risk of lung cancer. In non-smokers, the benefits of family history of tumor are not obvious, while smokers with family history of tumor have a significantly increased risk of lung cancer.
This shows that smoking and tumor family history have synergistic effect.
There is also a similar conclusion: hepatitis B infection and family history of liver cancer are independent risk factors for liver cancer, and the two have synergistic effects. In other words, the interaction of environmental factors (hepatitis B virus infection) and genetic factors has an important impact on the occurrence of familial liver cancer.
So we know, [Genes] and [various adverse stimuli] will further amplify each other’s promotion to the tumor. If there are tumor patients in the family, The focus should not be on the heredity of tumors, but more attention should be paid to how to live a healthy life. After all, genetic genes cannot be changed, but how to have a good living environment and healthy living habits can be changed through one’s own efforts.
Relatively speaking, having a good living environment and living habits is of even greater significance.