[LINK] "Elephants' low cancer risk may hold prevention lessons for humans"

[rfmcdonald]

CBC reports.

Lumbering elephants have so many cells but get few cancers, says a doctor who investigated rates of the disease in different mammals.

Compared with other mammals, elephants seem to have a lower-than-expected rate of cancer, researchers say in Thursday's issue of JAMA.

To reach that conclusion, Dr. Joshua Schiffman, a pediatric oncologist at the University of Utah School of Medicine in Salt Lake City and his co-authors surveyed information on the disease and the cause of death for 36 mammalian species.

They also compared responses to DNA damage in elephants with healthy human controls and people with Li-Fraumeni, a genetic syndrome that predisposes them to more than a 90 per cent lifetime risk of cancer and early childhood cancers.

More than 35 years ago, epidemiologist Richard Peto of Oxford University observed the incidence of cancer doesn't seem to be related to the number of cells in an organism. Peto's Paradox says larger and longer-living mammals develop cancer less frequently than expected.