Giannis Athanasiou
Nov 7 · 2 min read
Is there a way to escape cancer?

One of the major ‘serial killers’ of our time has a name known to everybody. It is a silent enemy and a vicious threat to our health. It is cancer, a long-standing disease, which affects all populations irrespective of individual characteristics whatsoever. It makes no exceptions. Neither age, nor gender. The sad feeling is that wherever I look, I find a person closely related to me or my family, that suffers from the disease.

The million dollar question that arises is therefore: ‘Are there any ways to avoid cancer?’ In my humble opinion, I think no, there are not. And to be a winner of this fight, you need to know your opponent well, like your best friend. Different kinds of cancer are treated differently, depending on the time of diagnosis and individual heterogeneity. A patient that is diagnosed with cancer at a very early stage, has many and safe chances to destroy this menace. Moreover, health-related behaviors and genetic factors lead to mutations of DNA and thus provoke cancer development.

What is really worrying is that cancer may also occur to fully healthy individuals due to a simple mistake on DNA during the cell division process. That means, you are never going to be in the safe side, just because you do not smoke, do not work in a harsh and unhealthy environment, do not consume alcohol excessively or even when you regularly exercise.

Of course it does not mean that whenever people are infected with cancer, they surrender to the disease. But many cancer treatments, like chemotherapy, have proven to be harmful, inefficient and disappointing for a wide majority of patients. The most promising treatment approach of the late years is called ‘immunotherapy’. The immune system targets and eliminates everything that is foreign and ‘unrecognizable’ in the organism. However, cancer cells are camouflaged soldiers that kill healthy cells and spread throughout the body, while the immune system seems unable to discover them. Therefore, recent drugs and therapies, aim to ‘wake up’ those immune cells to resist and fight back against cancer ‘invadors’.

We need to know that those therapies are in the development phase and much research is still needed to be sufficient against this killing machine. Personalized medicine approaches combined with immunotherapy are probably the next big thing, as dealing with cancer requires that the healthcare providers have knowledge over the personal health records of patients.

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