When I saw a great^n grandmother's 1870 census entry, which said she had 7 children, 1 of which was still alive (at 55), the reality of life back then hit me hard.
This a meaningless question for most people, if it helps save lives in the future, great.
I think you should also pay attention to Bret Weinstein's work on telomeres and cancer. If the environmental pressures are for a low age, you end up with long telomeres to allow more dividing of cells to replace those damaged, however those same long telomeres make you more susceptible to cancer should you live longer.
Are our telomeres long enough to allow for the development of cancer, or is it necessary for the system to be overridden, thus allowing cells to replicate indefinitely? My layman's understanding was that benign moles were benign, and not cancerous, because the telomere system was functioning normally and limiting growth. Am I wrong?
One thing which I always thought of, but which the article doesn't mention, is age. Especially older people seem more prone to cancer, so in my mind a lower life expectancy will naturally lead to a lower cancer rate, as people die before cancer "is able to get them". Or am I missing something?
A lot of the lower life expectancy was sky-high infant mortality, and if you made it to 10 in 1850 (hardly preindustrial, but preindustrial stats are harder to find) you could expect to live to 60 or so. Presumably you'd compare the cancer rates of your study's skeletons with the cancer rates of today's 60 year olds.
Not a biologist, but been around them long enough.
I been cultivating a theory that mammals strategy
is more or less "go fast; break things".
That is, asteroid or not, we were on track to out evolve
everything that came before by extending and exploiting
explosive cell growth. No animal converts matter & energy
to body-mass faster than young mammals, the cold blooded
do not stand a chance. The competition would get larger
eventually only if some adolescent mammal did not
eat them first as peers.
consider how you would bet on
a 1 year old raccoon
vs
a 1 year old alligator
then again with
a 5 year old raccoon
vs
a 5 year old alligator
The mammal strategy traded the long game for the quick win.
We have all sorts of (genetic) machinery who's function is to grow fast
but then STOP as we can't support gigantic sizes.
(Maybe in part because of the quick and dirty foundations
but thermodynamics have scaling issues too)
So we need to shut of all those machines before we get too big.
And so here we happily sit in our bodies, our mammal factory
and everything is great; just don't push that big red button
over there, or pull that lever or that one or that one or ...
eventually if you live long enough some of those buttons will be pushed
and the mammal machinery will do what it evolved to do.
grow fast and break things.
A final observation on humans in particular, recently bipedal,
have not gotten all the bugs worked out on that.
Deployed a monkey patch for dimorphic gender singling
requires cron job flipping on a subset of growth machinery
some years after the main global shutdown but only flip them on
for a season or so;
still seeing evidence of switch bounce issues, see ticket BCRA1.
Your objection is correct, and none of the responses you've received so far seem to have understood your point. I went ahead and read the actual published paper (https://acsjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002...) and it is just as statistically naive as the NatGeo article made it sound.
Let's cartoonishly oversimplify cancer so that we can see how life expectancy would affect observed statistics. Let's say cancer occurrence is 0% for people up to age 40, and then starting on the 40th birthday, cancer occurrence is 10% per year. Everyone who gets cancer dies immediately.
Then, imagine that life expectancy in 1500 was 25 years old, standard deviation 10 years (yeah lognormal blah blah just go with it). So, most people don't live to 40, but the ones who do sometimes get cancer.
But then, after 1500, life expectancy mean increases by 0.1 years per year. By the year 2000, life expectancy is 75 years old! Much more cancer is going to happen! Many more of the deaths will be from cancer!
Cancer itself didn't change.
So, these researchers see a lower cancer rate in the bones they're looking at, but they need to do some MATH on the ages these bones and of modern humans to know how to compare cancer rates then to cancer rates now.
Yes, age and life expectancy is a huge part of it. In the book "Rebel Cell: Cancer, Evolution, and the New Science of Life's Oldest Betrayal", Kat Arney touches upon this exact question and reaches the conclusion that cancer was as prevalent in ancient times as it is now (perhaps accounting for surges like smoking-related cancers), and also mentions age as a big factor in the archaeological discrepancy.
Life expectancy is a tricky number to compare across long spans of time because it's heavily influenced by people dying young which was much more common in the past than it is now, people did die earlier but it's not as bad as a say 40 year life expectancy would make it seem because that number is dragged down by lots of early childhood deaths.
Not only that, but I imagine in pre-industrial times, those who got currently-curable forms of cancer didn't get cured during those times, and Darwinian forces stopped them from reproducing.
There isn't a necessarily good or bad here but those Darwinian forces did eliminate a lot of genetic defects from the population before modern medicine.
In the future though we might be able to yet again eliminate defects not by natural selection but by gene editing while still allowing those individuals to carry on a normal life.
There were plenty of old people. Life expectancy was skewed by childhood death and urban poor and wasn’t as grim as we think. (Most people lived outside of urban areas)
One big thing to consider is how would an 18th century person know they had leukemia? Cancers that don’t have a physical manifestation were probably classified as some other mysterious malady.
I think evolution plays a part in why older people are more prone. A debilitating illness in your teens is likely to stop you reproducing and is more likely to vanish. But a genetic trait for cancer later in life can get past on.
Yes if you live long enough eventually some kind of cancer will kill you. This is inevitable due to accumulating cellular damage. Someday it might be possible to repair that damage but it's not clear how.
Also, even if the low average life expectancy was due to excessive mortality among children with chances to live up to 70 once one reached 40 not much different than today, it still does not imply that cancer rates were lower.
It could be very well that it is those people who would die as newborn or children without modern medicine and access to clean water have bigger chances of getting cancer with age.
This is a common misconception. Life expectancy hasn't changed much. It's children dying that bright down the average in earlier years. If you lived to your 20s your life expectancy was pretty much the same as it is now.
I think it was mainly less likely because people were so much more likely to die of other causes, so they'd die before the cancer got a chance. Healthcare was at its most basic and out of reach for common people.
I'm sure some of our environmental issues make cancer more likely. But we shouldn't imagine that the pre-industrial world was super healthy. People were living in filth. This was in fact one of the reasons they died so soon.
It's also one of the few things we haven't really found a cure for. I think because each cancer is a different random genetic mutation that would benefit the most from a custom generated antibody or something. Whereas other major causes of death have been pretty much eradicated by things like antibiotics and vaccines. So I think this makes the numbers relatively higher.
And of course because healthcare was so poor, I'm sure there would also be many causes of death misattributed. Even in this day and age we can't seem to standardise it. Some countries attribute every death to coronavirus if the person was infected, others only if it was 100% certain to be the cause of death.
I’d hazard a guess that a lot more people also died of “natural causes“. Unless you cut someone open, the way cancer actually kills you (organs shutting down, trouble breathing, etc) would be described as “natural causes” or getting old and dying…
Perhaps of some interest is the book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer:
> The book weaves together Mukherjee's experiences as a hematology/oncology fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital as well as the history of cancer treatment and research.[3][5] Mukherjee gives the history of cancer from its first identification 4,600 years ago by the Egyptian physician Imhotep. The Greeks had no understanding of cells, but they were familiar with hydraulics. Hippocrates thus considered illness to be an imbalance of four cardinal fluids: blood, black bile, yellow bile, phlegm. Galen applied this idea to cancer, believing it to be an imbalance of black bile. In 440 BCE, the Greek historian Herodotus recorded the first breast tumor excision of Atossa, the queen of Persia and the daughter of Cyrus, by a Greek slave named Democedes. The procedure was believed to have been successful temporarily. Galen's theory was later challenged by the work of Andreas Vaselius and Matthew Baille, whose dissections of human bodies failed to reveal black bile.
I would suspect bodily stressors like fasting reduce the chances of cancers taking hold because those cells are usually less resilient than normal cells (like the principles of chemotherapy). Having abundant food I would suspect is what gives most cancers a comfortable body to develop in.
Also, modern proliferation of toxic chemicals.
Furthermore, people living longer are inevitably going to go by either cardiovascular issues/stroke, pneumonia, or cancer.
The dismissive comments here are confusing to me. Of course this is a valuable thing to study, because without it we won't know if there are factors about our modern industrial society that could be altered to increase our lifespans even more. Or is 80 years just "good enough" and people don't want to live to 160? Also if we find that cancer was less prevalent before, that's a useful data point for how much cancer can be avoided in a hypothetical ideal situation that we should perhaps shoot for.
The modern age has possibly removed some carcinogens like inhaling smoke from (bon)fires, mycotoxins from spoilt food, nutritional illiteracy and unsanitary conditions.
But the modern age has introduced a lot of new ones like tobacco, food additives, sugar, gluten, radiation, asbestos, industrial processing of food, pesticides, sedentary lifestyle.
The methodology in this study seems really sketchy to me.
So we start with one indicator of bone cancer that is well-established: bone lesions. This indicator shows a significant rise from medieval to current times.
Now we use another, less established indicator (ct scan results) and find... a number consistent with the first result.
Finally, we make some "extrapolations" about the rate of undetectable cancer based on our observations and lots of assumptions.
In the end, we show that our extrapolated(!) cancer rate is higher than expected and does not show as much of a difference between medieval and modern times.
None of this explained the significant rise in the first indicator. Also, even if you liberally pad your data with extrapolations, wouldn't you have to apply the same formula to the indicators of cancer in modern-day individuals?
By the way, the modern-day cancer rate is still ~3x higher than even the extrapolated rate (15% vs 50%) - yet, the article goes one step further than the study and frames this as a finding that the cancer rate didn't grow at all.
I thought it was accepted by the medical community every major ailment occurred at much higher rates “back in the day”. That it’s a case of having lacked sophisticated detection methods the numbers are so low.
I'm more interested in the pre-agricultural world, and the differences between that time and our own would be significantly greater than comparing to a mere couple hundred years.
I am wondering if microplastic is a factor in addition to air and water pollution, processed/pre-packaged food.
Another factor maybe humankind beating/cancelling natural selection due to modern medicine. So people who would normally perish in olden days are living longer only to be later killed by cancer.
There’s another factor of total population. More people means more diversity and more DNA copying errors? Can someone expert in this field comment on this?
sv40 is a cancer causing virus that contaminated 1/3rd of all polio vaccines.
From wikipedia:
The discovery of SV40 revealed that between 1955 and 1963 around 90% of children and 60% of adults in the U.S. were inoculated with SV40-contaminated polio vaccines.
up to 14% of deaths 400 years ago in the UK were cancer according to the new research. It's currently 29% in the UK, and 17% in the world. 29% is much higher than 14% but according to the article people used to believe it used to be just 1%. How much of that increase to 29% is because of new problems or just because we live longer so cancers get the chance to kill us more vs all the things that used to kill us earlier
The age of glyphosate, an antibiotic that has been sprayed so much that it’s testable in the rain and in sources of groundwater at this point. The effects of long-term antibiotic exposure are up still being learned. But it clear means a gut biome disruption.
Thanks Monsanto. Err... Bayer (same people who sold Heroin over the counter 100 years ago)
Chiropractors are charlatans so it was the same as any other healing elixir scam that was being run (which are notable and commonplace throughout history).
Chiropractors don’t actually help with back pain or any of the other problems they claims to help. The practice is based on “re-aligning” subtle subluxations in the spine. Two problems: there is no evidence that these subtle subluxations exist, and there is no evidence that spine alignment even extreme ones cause any ailments other than pinched nerves. Here is a good summary about the history of this pseudo-science:
https://theoutline.com/post/1617/chiropractors-are-bullshit
Excerise and especially walking and running does a lot for back health but at the same time they probably did a lot heavy lifting and handicraft (weaving, shoe making, etc) in bad ergonomic positions.
We've always had charlatans pretending to have solutions to our problems before chiropracty and homeopathy, we had traveling salesmen peddling fish oil as a cure-all and of course the power of prayer.
Not sure if it speaks to the gullibility of humanity or craftiness of private enterprise.
[+] [-] mikewarot|4 years ago|reply
This a meaningless question for most people, if it helps save lives in the future, great.
I think you should also pay attention to Bret Weinstein's work on telomeres and cancer. If the environmental pressures are for a low age, you end up with long telomeres to allow more dividing of cells to replace those damaged, however those same long telomeres make you more susceptible to cancer should you live longer.
[+] [-] CoryAlexMartin|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agumonkey|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Sebb767|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] strken|4 years ago|reply
A lot of the lower life expectancy was sky-high infant mortality, and if you made it to 10 in 1850 (hardly preindustrial, but preindustrial stats are harder to find) you could expect to live to 60 or so. Presumably you'd compare the cancer rates of your study's skeletons with the cancer rates of today's 60 year olds.
[+] [-] tejtm|4 years ago|reply
The mammal strategy traded the long game for the quick win.
We have all sorts of (genetic) machinery who's function is to grow fast but then STOP as we can't support gigantic sizes. (Maybe in part because of the quick and dirty foundations but thermodynamics have scaling issues too)
So we need to shut of all those machines before we get too big.
And so here we happily sit in our bodies, our mammal factory and everything is great; just don't push that big red button over there, or pull that lever or that one or that one or ...
eventually if you live long enough some of those buttons will be pushed and the mammal machinery will do what it evolved to do. grow fast and break things.
A final observation on humans in particular, recently bipedal, have not gotten all the bugs worked out on that. Deployed a monkey patch for dimorphic gender singling requires cron job flipping on a subset of growth machinery some years after the main global shutdown but only flip them on for a season or so; still seeing evidence of switch bounce issues, see ticket BCRA1.
[+] [-] dsjoerg|4 years ago|reply
Let's cartoonishly oversimplify cancer so that we can see how life expectancy would affect observed statistics. Let's say cancer occurrence is 0% for people up to age 40, and then starting on the 40th birthday, cancer occurrence is 10% per year. Everyone who gets cancer dies immediately.
Then, imagine that life expectancy in 1500 was 25 years old, standard deviation 10 years (yeah lognormal blah blah just go with it). So, most people don't live to 40, but the ones who do sometimes get cancer.
But then, after 1500, life expectancy mean increases by 0.1 years per year. By the year 2000, life expectancy is 75 years old! Much more cancer is going to happen! Many more of the deaths will be from cancer!
Cancer itself didn't change.
So, these researchers see a lower cancer rate in the bones they're looking at, but they need to do some MATH on the ages these bones and of modern humans to know how to compare cancer rates then to cancer rates now.
[+] [-] eliben|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GuB-42|4 years ago|reply
These diseases are essentially dying of old age. Better treatment for heart disease will mechanically increase cancer deaths and/or Alzheimer.
[+] [-] rtkwe|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dheera|4 years ago|reply
There isn't a necessarily good or bad here but those Darwinian forces did eliminate a lot of genetic defects from the population before modern medicine.
In the future though we might be able to yet again eliminate defects not by natural selection but by gene editing while still allowing those individuals to carry on a normal life.
[+] [-] Spooky23|4 years ago|reply
One big thing to consider is how would an 18th century person know they had leukemia? Cancers that don’t have a physical manifestation were probably classified as some other mysterious malady.
[+] [-] 7952|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m463|4 years ago|reply
Turns out it was curing the <something>, but the next thing the population would statistically die of was: heart attacks.
[+] [-] nradov|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _0w8t|4 years ago|reply
It could be very well that it is those people who would die as newborn or children without modern medicine and access to clean water have bigger chances of getting cancer with age.
[+] [-] hanniabu|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GekkePrutser|4 years ago|reply
I'm sure some of our environmental issues make cancer more likely. But we shouldn't imagine that the pre-industrial world was super healthy. People were living in filth. This was in fact one of the reasons they died so soon.
It's also one of the few things we haven't really found a cure for. I think because each cancer is a different random genetic mutation that would benefit the most from a custom generated antibody or something. Whereas other major causes of death have been pretty much eradicated by things like antibiotics and vaccines. So I think this makes the numbers relatively higher.
And of course because healthcare was so poor, I'm sure there would also be many causes of death misattributed. Even in this day and age we can't seem to standardise it. Some countries attribute every death to coronavirus if the person was infected, others only if it was 100% certain to be the cause of death.
[+] [-] mlac|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throw0101a|4 years ago|reply
> The book weaves together Mukherjee's experiences as a hematology/oncology fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital as well as the history of cancer treatment and research.[3][5] Mukherjee gives the history of cancer from its first identification 4,600 years ago by the Egyptian physician Imhotep. The Greeks had no understanding of cells, but they were familiar with hydraulics. Hippocrates thus considered illness to be an imbalance of four cardinal fluids: blood, black bile, yellow bile, phlegm. Galen applied this idea to cancer, believing it to be an imbalance of black bile. In 440 BCE, the Greek historian Herodotus recorded the first breast tumor excision of Atossa, the queen of Persia and the daughter of Cyrus, by a Greek slave named Democedes. The procedure was believed to have been successful temporarily. Galen's theory was later challenged by the work of Andreas Vaselius and Matthew Baille, whose dissections of human bodies failed to reveal black bile.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor_of_All_Maladies
PBS made it into a documentary:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer_(film)
* https://www.pbs.org/show/story-cancer-emperor-all-maladies/
[+] [-] TimonKnigge|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] supernova87a|4 years ago|reply
"After you save people from dying of cheap things, they start dying of expensive things."
[+] [-] rubicks|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] doggodaddo78|4 years ago|reply
Also, modern proliferation of toxic chemicals.
Furthermore, people living longer are inevitably going to go by either cardiovascular issues/stroke, pneumonia, or cancer.
[+] [-] phendrenad2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arnejenssen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xg15|4 years ago|reply
So we start with one indicator of bone cancer that is well-established: bone lesions. This indicator shows a significant rise from medieval to current times.
Now we use another, less established indicator (ct scan results) and find... a number consistent with the first result.
Finally, we make some "extrapolations" about the rate of undetectable cancer based on our observations and lots of assumptions.
In the end, we show that our extrapolated(!) cancer rate is higher than expected and does not show as much of a difference between medieval and modern times.
None of this explained the significant rise in the first indicator. Also, even if you liberally pad your data with extrapolations, wouldn't you have to apply the same formula to the indicators of cancer in modern-day individuals?
By the way, the modern-day cancer rate is still ~3x higher than even the extrapolated rate (15% vs 50%) - yet, the article goes one step further than the study and frames this as a finding that the cancer rate didn't grow at all.
[+] [-] noT1|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] courtf|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bryanmgreen|4 years ago|reply
Mostly everything we consume these days has been touched by a form of plastic.
[+] [-] ksd482|4 years ago|reply
I am wondering if microplastic is a factor in addition to air and water pollution, processed/pre-packaged food.
Another factor maybe humankind beating/cancelling natural selection due to modern medicine. So people who would normally perish in olden days are living longer only to be later killed by cancer.
There’s another factor of total population. More people means more diversity and more DNA copying errors? Can someone expert in this field comment on this?
[+] [-] throwaway12319|4 years ago|reply
It's not a debated issue: it's well known.
[+] [-] 101001001001|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blutfink|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwtheacctawy|4 years ago|reply
I've seen countless stats that plots petro-chemical use over years, and cancer rates. The charts are identical.
[+] [-] szundi|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zackees|4 years ago|reply
From wikipedia: The discovery of SV40 revealed that between 1955 and 1963 around 90% of children and 60% of adults in the U.S. were inoculated with SV40-contaminated polio vaccines.
Link to studies: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=sv40...
[+] [-] newsclues|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pronlover723|4 years ago|reply
up to 14% of deaths 400 years ago in the UK were cancer according to the new research. It's currently 29% in the UK, and 17% in the world. 29% is much higher than 14% but according to the article people used to believe it used to be just 1%. How much of that increase to 29% is because of new problems or just because we live longer so cancers get the chance to kill us more vs all the things that used to kill us earlier
[+] [-] sharklazer|4 years ago|reply
Thanks Monsanto. Err... Bayer (same people who sold Heroin over the counter 100 years ago)
[+] [-] sonograph|4 years ago|reply
I have often wondered if back pain was less likely in the past? How did they manage without chiropractors?
[+] [-] XorNot|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelmachine|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ekianjo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeltz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] croes|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] klodolph|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwawayboise|4 years ago|reply
Tough it out. You had to work/farm/hunt to survive.
[+] [-] cortic|4 years ago|reply
We've always had charlatans pretending to have solutions to our problems before chiropracty and homeopathy, we had traveling salesmen peddling fish oil as a cure-all and of course the power of prayer.
Not sure if it speaks to the gullibility of humanity or craftiness of private enterprise.
[+] [-] wearywanderer|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]