Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

sirtuinpeach t1_j9acjfm wrote

I disagree with the people saying no here. Thanks to genome sequencing and tumour genome sequencing, we can definitely start chipping away at the cause of some cancers. Have a look at mutational signatures in human cancer on Google scholar. Some carcinogens can leave distinct signatures in tumour DNA, allowing determination of cause in some cases. Cigarette smoking is a good example of something that leaves a unique mutational signature. It’s a super interesting topic. There’s a great paper by Alexandrov et al (2020) in Nature.

2

sirtuinpeach t1_j9acwzd wrote

I think the tricky nuance with determining what has caused someone’s cancer is that cancer emerges after a few pre-cancerous mutations rather than just the one - kind of like a slippery slope mutation cascade that increases the likelihood of full blown malignant cancer by massive amounts with each mutation. So whilst smoking might cause one of those mutations, it’ll take a few more to become malignant! And then another few more to become metastatic cancer, the biggest killer

1