It is never easy to cope with the fact that some one dear to us has been strickened with cancer. *sigh*

It is even harder to accept if the person had led a perfectly healthy lifestyle -- exercising regularly, eating well, such as following Health Promotion Board's doctrine of eating 2 servings of fruit and 2 servings of vegetables daily. *Sigh*

You may have also heard about heart wrenching cases of young cancer patients whose parents are guilt-ridden and feel responsibile for their illness. *SIGH*

Actually, the cause of cancer is likely: Bad Luck or Just suay

A new study published in the journal Science finds that 66 per cent of the genetic mutations that develop into cancer are caused by simple random errors during cell replacements, while 29 per cent are due to environmental factors and five per cent are because of hereditary factors.

via GIPHY

Mutations, what's that?

Cells are building blocks of our body. They contain a blueprint called DNA, which can be read in segments (genes), that parents pass down to offsprings.

via GIPHY

Cells divide to replace old, dead, or damaged cells and to support growth. When cells divide, miscopies of DNA occasionally happen, which usually do no harm or result in a non-functioning gene.

By chance, miscopies may unfortunately produce cancer causing genes.

Such mutations are haphazard, and at least 2-3 mutations have to occur in order for cancer to happen. That means 3 times of suay-ness.

Lifestyle still matters

Although miscopies are random, your lifestyle can increase mutation rate. For example, smoking may increase the likelihood of a smoker getting cancer since their cells mutate more frequently. However, the formation of a cancer-causing gene from these mutations is a completely random event.

So keeping a healthy lifestyle is still important as you'll never know if factors such as obesity, smoking, lack of exercise and poor eating habits might lead to the tipping point by triggering that additional mutation. *fingers crossed*

Hope for new cancer prevention strategies

There are things that we can't control in life and getting cancer seems to be one of those. This is not the first piece of research that has attributed cancers to bad luck.

As reported by CNN, Cristian Tomasetti and Bert Vogelstein, two researchers from The Johns Hopkins University in US, presented this concept in their research paper back in 2015.

Vogelstein shared that such findings are important as a form of comfort to patients who once led healthy lifestyles, and also to parents, who will understand better the root causes of cancer:

"The first thing someone looking on the web would see is cancer is caused by environment or heredity. When it comes to the parent of a child with cancer, they think they either transmitted a bad gene or exposed their child to an environmental agent that caused disease.

"This causes a tremendous amount of guilt. We don't need to add guilt to an already tragic situation."

Vogelstein also hoped that new awareness of these random mutations will inspire many scientists to "devote their efforts to various strategies to limit the damage that these internal enemies do.":

"The first step is simply recognizing these enemies exist."

Top photo from Flickr user l4lollz

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