What part of the body is more likely to get cancer?

Question: What part of the body is more likely to get cancer?
- Keywords:
  cancer
Asked by jordanfarmer to Ruth, PB, Paul, Lyn, Katy on 21 Jun 2013.
- Peter Balfe answered on 21 Jun 2013:
  
  Lung cancer is at #1 but is slowly declining, then breast cancer, prostate, bowel…
  
  The list is here:
  http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/cancer-info/cancerstats/incidence/commoncancers/#Twenty
- Ee Lyn Lim answered on 22 Jun 2013:
  
  There are a few factors that might make parts of the body more likely to get cancer than others. The ones I can think of are:
  
  1) Parts that are growing fast, especially under the influence of hormones. Many types of hormones help cells grow, and sometimes cancer cells grab on to these hormones and won’t stop growing! A good example is breast cancer – during puberty, mammary tissue develops very rapidly, especially in girls, and this growth depends a lot on hormones like oestrogen. It’s after this growth spurt that most breast cancers start appearing – you can see why! Prostate and ovarian cancers are also often dependent on high amounts of hormones – in some cases, if you take away the cancer cell’s ability to make use of hormones, the cancer simply dies away.
  
  2) Parts of the body that are exposed to a harmful environment. Number 1 is the lung, because of what you breath – especially if you smoke! Chemicals in cigarette smoke and other pollutants can damage cells, and some damaged cells become cancerous.
  
  3) Parts of the body that grow fast AND are exposed to harmful environments. Skin is the most obvious one – your skin has to be renewed constantly, because it gets sloughed off all the time every time you touch something. The layer of dead cells at the surface of your skin actually helps to protect you, but that means new cells always need to be produced to replace them. At the same time your skin is the part that gets all the sunlight – UV rays can damage your DNA, and cause cancer! It’s the same with your gut lining, which gets sloughed off as food passes through your gut, and has to deal with all the unhealthy chemicals in your food. If a cell is already programmed to keep growing, it’s easier for DNA damage to knock it out of control.
  
  That accounts for the top bit of that list Peter’s provided, but as you can see cancer can happen anywhere in the body, either because of random mutation, or for reasons we don’t understand yet!
- Paul Waines answered on 25 Jun 2013:
  
  Lung cancer is the most common, but I think a big reason for this might be because too many of us smoke too much and do work which makes it more likely for us to catch it.
- Katy Brown answered on 25 Jun 2013:
  
  It also depends on if you are male or female, and on your age. For men, the most common cancer is prostate cancer, while for women it is breast cancer. Young people are more likely to get bone cancer and leukaemia while elderly people get more skin, breast and prostate cancer.

Question: What part of the body is more likely to get cancer?

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