Looking Deeper Into Cancer Prevention

Our research advisor Dr Mats J Stensrud recently published a new findings on cancer prevention.

Preventing cancer: mere rhetoric or a promising plan?

In December 1971, two years after the successful Apollo 11 moon landing, US President Richard Nixon launched a “war on cancer” with the signing of the National Cancer Act. Since that time, billions of dollars and thousands of careers have been devoted to finding ways to prevent or cure the disease. But the fight is not yet over.

When Nixon’s war began, cancer was the second leading cause of death in the USA. That remains the case today. To intensify this ongoing war, a funding initiative, the “Cancer Moonshot“, was announced during President Barack Obama’s final year in office. The aim was to identify new ways to prevent, diagnose, and treat cancer.

But after all the money and time that has been spent, and with cancer incidence expected to increase in the years to come, a question may come to mind: how many cancers can we actually expect to prevent?

Read more at: Significance Magazine

About the authors

Mats Julius Stensrud is a postdoctoral researcher the University of Oslo and currently a Fulbright Scholar at Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. His main research interest is causal inference in medicine. He also holds a medical degree, and he used to work as a resident doctor in internal medicine.

Morten Valberg is a postdoctoral researcher at the Oslo Centre for Biostatistics and Epidemiology, University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital. He completed his PhD in biostatistics at the University of Oslo in 2014. One of his main research interests lies in the modelling of unobserved heterogeneity in survival analysis.

Arithmox Team