Another failed war? About 60% of cancers are preventable.

• Author: Riczo, Steve
• Position: Medicine & Health

THIS YEAR, more than 580,000 Americans will die from what medical specialists believe to be a largely preventable disease--cancer. That is more than all of the servicemen and women who died in action during the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, Korea, and World War II--combined. Cancer is the No. 1 killer in the U.S. for people under the age of 85, and it is not just something that happens to other people--almost everyone has (or has had) someone in their lives who has (or has had) cancer. The lifetime risk of getting cancer is one out of three for women and one out of two for men.

What is cancer and why, more than four decades after Pres. Richard Nixon declared a War on Cancer (with the signing of the National Cancer Act in 1971) are we still looking for a cure? According to the National Cancer Institute, cancer is a term used for diseases in which abnormal cells divide without control and are able to invade other tissues and organs via the blood and lymph systems.

Although many people think of cancer as being organ-specific--such as lung, breast, prostate, cervical, and colon--specialists say that it actually is many diseases characterized by a variety of genetic mutations that take place within our cells. "Cancers are a multitude of diseases, hundreds if not thousands of different diseases," notes Dean Hosgood at Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

While some cancers are declining in the U.S., others inexplicably are increasing, including childhood cancers. "For thyroid cancer, that could be environmental chemicals but I don't think we have a clue. For brain cancer, we don't have a clue," admits Robert Hiatt, chair of the Department of Epidemiology at the University of California, San Francisco.

Cancer cells can be remarkably persistent and resilient. Howard Gross, an oncologist with the Dayton (Ohio) Clinical Oncology Program, asserts, "Cancer cells are sometimes smarter than we are. They get knocked down and then they sneak around and come up with a resistance mechanism that fools us all."

As a result of the complexity of cancer, finding effective treatments has been challenging. "We know the facts about cancer treatment. They are still not good," says Jeff Bland, president of the Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institute. Adds Richard Heller, professor of medical laboratory and radiation sciences at Old Dominion University: "Many times, chemotherapy does not have that big of a success rate for many types of cancers although there are some in which chemo works very well."

Indeed, there has been some notable progress. For instance, in spite of the large absolute numbers of cancer deaths, mortality rates from cancer are going down by about one percent per year. With some cancers, such as breast, improvements in early...