Embarrassing Illnesses is a recent series on television in the UK, lets face it most blokes don’t talk about feeling their balls (some blokes do all the while - but we’ll ignore them!).
Moseley Rugby team showed up and told all for the recent TV show about embarrassing illnesses - to prove you can talk about it!
Alright it’s a funny title, but recent research on mice has found that smoking can not only cause cancer (which we all know!) but can damage sperm by changing it’s DNA sequence.
Several Mature Mice were exposed to cigarette smoke for either six or 12 weeks, while a specific strech of repeated portions of DNA were monitored (a section believe not to contain any genes).
Having been exposed to two cigareetes a day (an equivalent to an average human smoker), the team found the rate of mutations in the smoking mice were higher (1.7 times higher in the 12 week smokers, and 1.4 in the 6 week smokers) compared to that of the non-smoking mice.
This, according to the team, suggests that damage is related to the duration of exposure. “So the longer you smoke, the more mutations accumulate and the more likely a potential effect may arise in the offspring,”
Other Blogs reporting this:
That’s the aim of Cancer Research UK who’ve set themselves some pretty aggressive targets! It come on the back of new figures which show a patient with cancer now has a 46.2% chance of being alive ten years after diagnosis compared with 23.6% 30 years ago.
The goals in full for 2020 are:
Survival ranges currently range from 2.5% for pancreatic cancer to 95% for testicular cancer. 66% of patients with breast cancer are alive 20 years after diagnosis but there has been no improvement in survival for lung cancer.
“We don’t generally use an overall survival figure for cancer, partly because it is not a helpful number to individual cancer patients anxious to know their own chances.
“But since the new goals relate to cancer as a whole, we feel it is important to define a simple baseline for watching progress.”