Cecil mentioned that one “plausible” guess about why muscle cancers in general are rare was the rate of cell replacement. Presumably, he meant that muscle cells are replaced slowly compared to, say, glandular cells.
Here’s the problem with that guess: two fairly common cancers are brain and testicular cancer. And both organs(all three, if you want to be pedantic!) have extremely slow cell replacement, much slower than muscles. In the case of the brain, I think it’s zero.
But don’t trust me on this; I’m not a doctor, but I did play one on TV.
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It’s true that neurons seldom reproduce, although recently they’ve found evidence that at least one part of the adult brain does grow new neurons under certain conditions.
But in brain cancer, the cells that become cancerous are not neurons, but rather glial cells. There’s about 10 glial cells for each neuron. They perform support functions for the brain.
Brain cancer isn’t common. I just did a quick search, and this list, as well as others I found, doesn’t even mention brain cancer in a list of ten most common cancers. And just as a seat-of-the-pants observation, it seems to me most brain tumors are metastases.
As for the testicles, they produce new cells all the time, perhaps more often than any other part of the body. We call these cells sperm.