Is Cancer a matter of Bad Luck? Walk, Stretch or Dance? Which is Better for the Brain. We Yak About this and more.

 

Without a cure in sight, cancer has become one of society’s biggest concerns. The fear of getting it is enough for many people to change their lifestyles in dramatic and meaningful ways, and even though it’s increasingly possible to beat the disease, it remains one of the biggest universal health worries.

As it turns out, all that anxiety may be for nothing, as new research suggests that getting cancer is more about bad luck than lifestyle factors, though it’s still possible to lessen your overall chances.

As it turns out, all that anxiety may be for nothing, as new research suggests that getting cancer is more about bad luck than lifestyle factors, though it’s still possible to lessen your overall chances.

Usually Science has historically kept its distance when it comes to estimating the number of cancers that are caused by any particular factor, and what cases of the disease would have happened regardless of outside influence. Johns Hopkins University scientists published a new study in the journal Science that does exactly what researchers have avoided doing for ages, and the figures may come as a bit of a surprise.

The team sought to pinpoint the cause of the genetic mutations that cause cancer, and determine what influenced the outcome. Shockingly, the data suggests that a full 66% of the mutations that eventually result in cancer are completely random errors in the DNA, with no direct cause. Environmental factors — like smoking, pollution, and all the other things we think of as being triggers for the disease — account for about 29% of cancers. The last 5% are thought to be inherited.

The scientists explain that DNA mutations normally don’t occur in genes with cancer-causing ability, and therefor don’t have any negative consequences. When mutations randomly occur in certain genes, however, cancer may result, and most of the time it’s simply “bad luck.”

Walk, Stretch or Dance? Dancing May Be Best for the Brain

by GRETCHEN REYNOLDS, nytimes.com

April 5, 2017

Could learning to dance the minuet or fandango help to protect our brains from aging?

A new study that compared the neurological effects of country dancing with those of walking and other activities suggests that there may be something unique about learning a social dance. The demands it places on the mind and body could make it unusually potent at slowing some of the changes inside our skulls that seem otherwise inevitable with aging.

Neuroscientists and those in middle age or beyond know that brains alter and slow as we grow older. Processing speed, which is a measure of how rapidly our brains can absorb, assess and respond to new information, seems to be particularly hard hit. Most people who are older than about 40 perform worse on tests of processing speed than those who are younger, with the effects accelerating as the decades pass.

Scientists suspect that this decline is due in large part to a concomitant fraying of our brain’s white matter, which is its wiring. White matter consists of specialized cells and their offshoots that pass messages between neurons and from one part of the brain to another. In young brains, these messages whip from neuron to neuron with boggling speed. But in older people, brain scans show, the white matter can be skimpier and less efficient. Messages stutter and slow.

Whether this age-related decline in white matter is inexorable, however, or might instead be changeable has been unclear.

So for the new study, which was published this month in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, researchers from the University of Illinois in Urbana an...