Lifestyle Choices Can Influence Genetic Risks for Cancer

Key Takeaway

A healthy lifestyle — which includes physical activity, a diet rich in whole grains, fruits, and vegetable but not red and processed meats, alcohol, or tobacco — may offset genetic risks for five cancers.
An unhealthy lifestyle, however, can increase overall cancer risk and the risk of eight cancer types

Why This Matters

Telling patients genetically predisposed to cancer that they have some control over their situation may alleviate distress and help them make positive lifestyle changes.

Study Design

Almost 200,000 people in the UK Biobank were surveyed about their lifestyle habits between 2006 and 2010.
Their baseline genetic risks for various tumors were assessed using Biobank data, and participants were checked for new-onset tumors through 2019.

Key Results

Unhealthy habits increased the overall risk of cancer 32%.
Unhealthy habits increased the risk of eight cancer types: lung cancer (hazard ratio [HR], 3.5), bladder cancer (HR, 2.03), pancreatic cancer (HR, 1.98), kidney cancer (HR, 1.91), pharyngeal cancer (HR, 1.69), uterine cancer (HR, 1.63), colorectal cancer (HR, 1.42), and breast cancer (HR, 1.42).
Healthy lifestyles didn’t decrease the risk of melanoma, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, ovarian cancer, or lymphocytic leukemia.
The authors say their findings also suggest that “a healthy lifestyle may be of greater benefit in those with a high genetic susceptibility to colorectal, breast, and pancreatic cancers, and may completely offset genetic risk for lung and bladder cancers.”

Limitations

Habits were self-reported.
Only adults of European ancestry were included.
The median follow-up was 10.2 years, which is likely too short to assess the true incidence of new cancers.
Genetic risk assessment was based solely on single-nucleotide polymorphisms and thus was incomplete.

Disclosures

The study was funded by the Australian government and others. The investigators didn’t report any conflicts of interest.

This is a summary of a preprint research report led by Stephanie Byrne of the University of South Australia, Adelaide. The full text can be found at medrxiv.org.

M. Alexander Otto is a physician assistant with a master’s degree in medical science. He is an award-winning medical journalist who worked for several major news outlets before joining Medscape and is an MIT Knight Science Journalism fellow. Email: [email protected].

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