Are there general 'anti-cancer' therapies doctors give patients for preventative care

Factual Questions
1

With vascular disease there are various medicines doctors can give patients to reduce their risk of vascular disease by reducing risk factors. Anti-hypertensives, statins, blood thinners, etc. They take people who haven’t had a vascular event and reduce their risk despite them not having any symptoms yet.

Does anything like that exist for anti-cancer properties, are there general risk factors for most cancers that can be addressed metabolically via medications? Is there a class of drugs a doctor will give someone at risk of cancer but who doesn’t have it yet a lower chance of suffering from it down the road, or is it pretty much just lifestyle interventions like not smoking, lower stress, exercise, good diet, etc? ie, are there pharmacological interventions to give pre-cancerous patients to reduce the risk of developing cancer the way we have pharmacological interventions for people who haven’t had a vascular event to reduce the risk of them developing one down the road?

I know that cancer is technically 200+ different diseases, so I don’t know if such a thing is realistic. But of all those cancers, aren’t cancers of maybe 5 or 6 organs responsible for 50%+ of all cancer deaths in the US? Lung, breast, colon, pancreas, etc?

I think nolvadex is used in pre-cancerous women who are at high risk of breast cancer but who don’t have it yet. There are also various anti-cancer vaccines but I think each is only for a very specific subset of cancer.

Is there any drug doctors use which has a wider range of applications, has medicine advanced to that point?

2

My doctor recommended vitamin D as anti cancer medicine.

Also, I heard that cancer doesn’t like oxygen. So exercise is good.

3

A healthy diet and exercise are my personal choices.

4

It hasn’t, and with a basic understanding of what causes cancer (basically everything and it’s part of aging itself) you might realize that it is unlikely that some effective preventative measure will be found. As I have reiterated many times on this forum, usually talking to the wind - the only way you’re going to even have a slim chance of seeing a century from now is to bypass the weak link, your body itself. You need to have your brain frozen before it rots, and maybe it can be reconstructed. Not great odds but it’s the only idea that has any realistic possibility of working. The current method for most serious disease is “suck money out of your wallet for care that extends your life by a few months, painfully, and then you still die”.

5

Without question the most effective “medicines” are regular exercise and a healthy diet but some medicines are indeed being studied as possibly having broad cancer prevention impacts. The most well known in the diabetes medication metformin.

6

For the specific case of skin cancer we have pretty good evidence that sunscreen used liberally and diligently will significantly reduce cancer incidence in otherwise susceptible populations. So that’s a chemical intervention to (mostly?) offset the effect of less-healthy lifestyle choices.

There is also this stuff Imiquimod - Wikipedia which seems to be effective at stopping the progression of actinic keratosis towards squamous cell skin cancer.

But AFAIK, that’s about it.

7

Exercise does seem to have some cancer preventative qualities, in part by helping to decrease body mass and thus lowering susceptibility to certain cancers (including carcinomas of the endometrium and breast). But it’s not because it boosts oxygen in the body.

The idea that improving tissue oxygenation through natural means (i.e. exercise) or through various woo therapies (such as ingesting concentrated hydrogen peroxide) kills off cancer cells or prevents them from developing into tumors because “cancer doesn’t like oxygen” is nonsense. If this was the case, it’s hard to see how anyone would get lung cancer.

8

I know diet and exercise have broad health benefits, I mentioned that in the OP but I was wondering about medical interventions also.

On the subject though, and I’m sure I’ve asked this before, what ‘all’ lifestyle factors that a person can control provide broad spectrum health benefits (or health risks if you don’t do them)?

[ol]
[li]Healthy diet[/li][li]Adequate exercise[/li][li]Healthy BMI and waist size[/li][li]High quality sleep[/li][li]High quality/quantity social relationships[/li][li]Stress reduction techniques[/li][li]Avoiding environmental toxins (smoking, too much sunlight, some chemicals, etc)[/li][/ol]

Is that about it?

On the subject, it seems like there is a pyramid of medicine (in a way) as it relates to what I’m talking about, going from narrow spectrum to broad spectrum.

[ol]
[li]A medication that helps prevent one kind of cancer (HPV vaccine for cervical cancer; nolvadex for breast cancer; sunscreen for skin cancer)[/li]
[li]A medication that helps prevent many/most forms of cancer - ?[/li]
[li]A medication (or lifestyle intervention) that works against many/most diseases of old age (cancer is just one disease of old age among many) - exercise, healthy diet, stress reduction, etc. These work for several forms of cancer, but they also help with several forms of vascular disease, several forms of dementia, several forms of age related bone and joint disorders, etc. [/li][/ol]

**DSeid’**s mention of Metformin makes me wonder if it is more like the third than the second. I know metformin is being look at for some new clinical studies because it has some anti aging properties. That would make it a third category type drug rather than a second if the anti-cancer properties were due to anti-aging rather than anti-cancer.

It seems like there shoudl be some biochemical pathways that would fit situation 2. For example reading up, apparently the ATF3 gene has a role in cancer (stress can activate the gene, which can make cancer worse). I wonder if any work on an ATF3 gene inhibitor would have broad spectrum anti-cancer properties. I’m sure there are other genes involved in the immune system or apoptosis that could have wide anti-cancer properties.

Hormones like HGH or IGF-1 may have (as far as I know at least) a role in many forms of cancer.

Glycolysis is used by cancer cells more than other forms of energy production, I don’t know if research on an anti-glycolysis drug would have broad spectrum anti-cancer properties that would be safe.

9

:frowning: