‘Unhealthy lifestyle aggravating cancer issue in Pakistan’

 FAISALABAD: Nearly half of cancer cases could be prevented if people changed their lifestyle or reduced their environmental exposure to cancer-causing agents, including smoking, unhealthy food habit, obesity and radiation, said Dr Nawazish Ali from the Cancer Treatment Centre of America.

In a special lecture on cancer screening and prevention at the University of Agriculture Faisalabad here on Tuesday, he said that smoking, Niswar, Gutka and Paan Spari increased the risk factor of cancer up to 90 per cent, which was the second leading cause of deaths.

The lifetime risk of developing cancer was 1 in 2 for men and 1 in 3 for women, he said, adding that 78 per cent of all types of cancer were diagnosed in people of 55 years of age or older. He said that intrinsic risk factors contributed only modestly (less than 30 per cent of lifetime risk) to cancer development. He said that the breast cancer was increasing in women and it was the leading life taking cancer for women. He said that screening was the system to looking for cancer before a person had any symptoms that would help find cancer at an early stage. About the lung cancer, he said that it was one of the leading causes of cancer deaths for both men and women with 157,300 deaths per year (about 84 per cent) in the United States.

Punjab Medical College Principal Dr Sardar M Al-Farid Zafar said that Faisalabad was rich in the PhD researches. He called for developing a platform of scientists to work on issues of the people. He also called for setting up a new cancer hospital to facilitate the increasing patients. He said that unhealthy lifestyle was aggravating the cancer issue in Pakistan. He said that unavailability of potable water for the common man was increasing the hepatitis C cases for which we have to expedite the efforts. He praised the university for launching BS Programme in Human Nutrition and Dietetics that would provide the trained manpower in the field.

Faculty of Food and Nutrition Home Sciences Dean Dr Masood Sadiq Butt said that the healthy food and life style reduced the risk of many diseases. He called for adopting preventive measures by saying that prevention was better than cure.

He suggested mapping out a strategy to aware the masses about the preventative measures to curb the increasing cases of cancer. In women, the breast cancer was increasing with an alarming rate, he added. ORIC Director Dr Asif Ali and cardiologist Dr Naeem Aslam also spoke on the occasion.