By Although the biggest health scare right now is the coronavirus pandemic spreading around the world, one of the biggest causes of death continues to be cancer. This is an illness which has claimed millions of lives, and there is a still a lot of ongoing research into how it starts, prevention and treatment.
It was as recently as the middle of the 1940s when in America a group of scientists discovered that it was possible to treat cancers with chemotherapy – an idea previously that had been considered far too dangerous as anything that would kill cancer would also kill the patient. This was the start of the use of chemotherapy in treating cancers.
Since then, a lot of research has been done into this deadly illness that affects millions of people around the world. Many companies like Richmond Pharmacology run clinical trials and adaptive phase 1 studies to try to discover new and better ways of treating patients effectively.
As well as this, there have been a lot of studies done on lifestyles and how that can affect the risks of developing cancer- we now know that smoking, red meat and alcohol can all raise our risks, something that nobody was aware of in the 1940s.
This also means that a lot of treatments have been vastly improved and come on in leaps and bounds – there are now some forms of cancer that have a much higher rate of survival, especially if they are caught quickly enough.