Cancer rates in medieval Britain around ten times higher than previously thought, study suggests

[PeteS in CA]

Cancer rates in medieval Britain around ten times higher than previously thought, study suggests

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-04-cancer-medieval-britain-ten-higher.html

The first study to use X-rays and CT scans to detect evidence of cancer among the skeletal remains of a pre-industrial population suggests that between 9-14% of adults in medieval Britain had the disease at the time of their death.

This puts cancer prevalence in a time before exposure to tumour-inducing chemicals from industry and tobacco at around ten times higher than previously thought, according to researchers.

Prior research into historic cancer rates using the archaeological record has been limited to examining the bone exterior for lesions. It suggested that cancer was rare, affecting less than 1% of the population.

A team led by the University of Cambridge have now coupled visual inspection with radiological imaging to analyse 143 skeletons from six medieval cemeteries in and around the city of Cambridge, UK, dating from the 6th to the 16th century.

This at least suggests that the modern idea that cancer has increased significantly in modern times due to (pick your bogey-cause) is at least partly based on ignorance of past cancer incidence reality.

[bigheadfred]

bkmk

[bigheadfred]

This puts cancer prevalence in a time before exposure to tumour-inducing chemicals from industry and tobacco at around ten times higher than previously thought, according to researchers.

Damned climate change.

[Smokin Joe]

It is back to biased data.

When it was noted that people in certain occupations smoked more and got more cancer, tobacco was subject to a virtual jihad, denying any benefit from its consumption.

It has the opposite effects of alcohol. It is a stimulant, antidepressant, and constricts the peripheral blood vessels.

You see films of wounded soldiers smoking, even with torso (chest) wounds in WWII. Why? because it helped combat hypovolemic shock by redirecting blood flow to the organs by constricting peripheral vessels. It also offsets the effects of psychogenic shock to some extent (observation as an EMT).

But it is messy, does damage the lungs, etc. --all problems conspicuously absent from any discussion of marijuana.

I strongly suspect that cancer is a combination of factors, possibly pathogenic in part, some due to irritants (asbestos, smoke) and industrial and environmental exposures that got short shrift when tobacco became the boogeyman of choice. Genetics may play a greater role than suspected.

In short, those data have been compromised by questionable science, in that when one factor was identified, others were not looked for, and that abandonment of query has set back science through dogma. Something we are seeing yet again with COVID.

[mountaineer]

Interesting!

[Lando Lincoln]

See!  We knew that Covid vaccine was trouble!

[PeteS in CA]

See!  We knew that Covid vaccine was trouble!

  Yep! And all thanks to Sir William Gates and Lord Fauci!

[catfish1957]

Surprising, since the life expectancy was about 20 years less back in that day.  Cancer generally is more prevalent  in those 50+, so seems with so many dying before 50, i'd guess the overall rate would be less.

[Smokin Joe]

See!  We knew that Covid vaccine was trouble!

I know you are joking, but I don't see the vaccine itself as trouble so much as the mindset which says it is the ONLY solution, the only way out of "lockdown" and the draconian circus. For some, the damage done is irrecoverable, not from the disease (although millions have been affected by that here, directly and indirectly), but by the approach to stopping the disease.

The amount of politically based dogma involved is stunning, and yet another example of how politics has invaded science to the point where the mere threat of excommunication or exile in the earlier days of scientific inquiry seems small compared to the modern persecution gauntlet of being cancelled, ridiculed in media great and small, defunded, and made into a scientific pariah for crime being right in your disagreement with the current dogma that is parading itself as "science".

Unfortunately, this is becoming a norm, even in subjects which should be reasonably quantifiable, because the concept of simply studying data has been tainted by those who set out to prove a given theory instead of test it. Crafting experiments which do not provide a valid test of outcomes, "adjusting" data, skewing models have been de rigueur in Climate studies over the past few decades, and this mindset is substituting for the Scientific method in other fields as well.

As for the vaccine, we won't know unless/until the effects are known long term. I say "unless" because those proponents who 'cancelled' alternatives are capable of muddying the waters of the results of the vaccine programs as well by simply discarding or making unavailable evidence which contradicts their foregone conclusions.

[Smokin Joe]

Surprising, since the life expectancy was about 20 years less back in that day.  Cancer generally is more prevalent  in those 50+, so seems with so many dying before 50, I'd guess the overall rate would be less.

Perhaps the genetics which are more likely to lead to earlier cancer have been largely eliminated because of that shorter life expectancy among those who died of cancer then, relatively young, while those more resistant lived on to produce progeny with that resistance. Complete elimination of any trait in a human population is unlikely, but dominance of the bloodlines which are resistant is possible.

[jmyrlefuller]

Surprising, since the life expectancy was about 20 years less back in that day.  Cancer generally is more prevalent  in those 50+, so seems with so many dying before 50, i'd guess the overall rate would be less.

Keep in mind though that that lower life expectancy was driven in large part by a ridiculously large number of children dying young and/or mothers dying in childbirth. If you were a boy who made it to 16, your life expectancy was probably only about 10 years shorter than a modern man.