News from CDC: applying a life course approach to primary cancer prevention

摘要

Each year, over 1.5 million people in the USA are told that they have cancer [1], a major challenge for everyone facing a cancer diagnosis, as well as for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the nation's prevention agency. Cancer is more easily prevented than cured [2], yet many avoidable risk factors remain prevalent. We now understand that cancer is actually many diseases, caused by different factors operating, sometimes synergistically, over many years. A transdisciplinary approach can be used to synthesize and disseminate the disparate knowledge needed to develop and implement effective cancer prevention programs [3, 4].