Cancer Research UK: Lifestyle changes could prevent 4 in 10 cancer cases

23 Mar 2018 --- Roughly 4 in 10 cases of cancer in the UK could have been prevented per year through lifestyle changes. This is according to a new landmark study led by Cancer Research UK and published in the British Journal of Cancer. Cancer Research UK notes that although it has done calculations like this before, this new research uses all the latest available data and evidence to give more accurate estimates. 

“This research is about providing clear information on where the different causes of cancer rank against one another, to encourage people to consider making positive changes, and highlight where the government can focus its efforts to prevent more cases of cancer,” the group says.

“We took data from national surveys showing how common each risk factor is in the population, and data from the UK cancer registries showing how many cases of each cancer type there are. Then we searched published research for information on how much each risk factor increases cancer risk, using only gold standard epidemiology research,” says Dr. Katrina Brown, who led the analysis at Cancer Research UK.

The team did this for all the modifiable risk factors and found that in total, more than 135,000 cases of cancer could be prevented through changes such as: stopping smoking, keeping a healthy weight, cutting back on alcohol and eating a healthy diet.

Prevention works
Responsible for a huge 54,300 cases of cancer every year in the UK, this latest study confirms that smoking is the biggest cause of cancer. 

“Even though smoking prevalence is falling in the population, smoking has a massive impact on the cancer risk of people who do it. Therefore it’s still generating a huge number of cancer cases,” says Brown.

UK Cancer Research notes that obesity causes more than 60 cases of cancer a day. Being overweight or obese increases the risk of 13 different types of cancer, and causes around 22,800 cases of cancer in the UK every year, according to the new data. That makes it the second biggest cause of cancer in the UK after smoking.

However, only 15 percent of people know that obesity causes cancer. So this is an important issue to raise, which is the aim of our much-discussed national awareness campaign. Unlike smoking rates, obesity levels have overall risen over the last couple of decades. 

The data come from comparing large groups of people so UK Cancer Research stresses that this research can’t tell what has caused or will cause an individual’s cancer. 

“This research was looking at the impact of these risk factors on a population level, rather than the effect they would have for an individual person,” says Brown. “But it can give us an indication of the relative importance of the risk factors for individuals. This is because it considers how much the factor increases individual risk, how many cancer types are affected, and whether those are common cancer types.”