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@smoore4 Those are interesting studies and statistics. I drank heavily as a teenager, and all through my 20s. However I quit drinking on Oct 16, 1984, clean and sober for 41 years. BUT, my father passed from esophageal cancer when he was 56, and between me and my 5 siblings, 4 of us have had cancer, 2 prostate, 1 colorectal and 1 breast cancer. So, perhaps my youthful alcohol consumption played a role in my prostate cancer, however I would wager my cancer is more likely from my genetics. Surprisingly, my mother passed only 3 years ago at the age of 94 from natural causes, never had any form of cancer. She was as sharp as a tack right up to her passing.
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@carlsbadguy Quite likely genetics. Unfortunately, current genetic testing barely scratches the surface for cancer. They can spot obvious stuff like BRCA1/2 — which is huge progress from a couple of decades ago — but don't really understand most of the complex, shifting combinations that create a genetic predisposition to cancer.
Then there's also just random chance. Cells divide all the time, and with more than 30 trillion cells (30,000,000,000,000) in the human body, and ~3 billion letters in the human genome to copy with each cell's division, mutations happen fairly regularly. Almost always, the mutations are harmless, or the immune system catches the mutated cells and kills them off, or they just die off on their own, but every once in a while one of them manages to hang on and start reproducing out of control. Then you have what we call "cancer".
@carlsbadguy Likewise my mother, who lived to be almost 99. She smoked 3 packs of cigarettes per day for most of her life until we took them away at age 88 due to dementia. She started at age 8 - YES, I said EIGHT! In her father’s saloon, grabbing still smoldering butts from the dirty barroom floor and puffing them back to life.
A revolting, disgusting thing to do but she truly loved the well dressed, handsome thugs that inhabited the barroom, taking bets, selling swag and living the dream!🤣
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@carlsbadguy
I am so sorry to hear that : (.
Did you ever seek genetic testing ? It might be wise thing to do since it is important to know if your cancer was caused by inherited genes. There are nowadays therapies that are targeted toward certain gene mutations like BRCA etc. It will also help with risk stratification for recurrence etc.