Report for: Variation in cancer risk among tissues can be explained by the number of stem cell divisions

Title	Variation in cancer risk among tissues can be explained by the number of stem cell divisions
Published in	Science, January 2015
DOI	10.1126/science.1260825
Pubmed ID	25554788
Authors	C. Tomasetti, B. Vogelstein
Abstract	Some tissue types give rise to human cancers millions of times more often than other tissue types. Although this has been recognized for more than a century, it has never been explained. Here, we show that the lifetime risk of cancers of many different types is strongly correlated (0.81) with the total number of divisions of the normal self-renewing cells maintaining that tissue's homeostasis. These results suggest that only a third of the variation in cancer risk among tissues is attributable to environmental factors or inherited predispositions. The majority is due to "bad luck," that is, random mutations arising during DNA replication in normal, noncancerous stem cells. This is important not only for understanding the disease but also for designing strategies to limit the mortality it causes.

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Twitter Demographics

The data shown below were collected from the profiles of 1,254 tweeters who shared this research output. Click here to find out more about how the information was compiled.

Geographical breakdown

Country	Count	As %
United States	250	20%
Japan	124	10%
United Kingdom	69	6%
Spain	51	4%
Canada	33	3%
Netherlands	25	2%
France	20	2%
Australia	16	1%
Germany	14	1%
Other	147	12%
Unknown	505	40%

Demographic breakdown

Type	Count	As %
Members of the public	908	72%
Scientists	239	19%
Practitioners (doctors, other healthcare professionals)	74	6%
Science communicators (journalists, bloggers, editors)	33	3%

Mendeley readers

The data shown below were compiled from readership statistics for 1,910 Mendeley readers of this research output. Click here to see the associated Mendeley record.

Geographical breakdown

Country	Count	As %
United States	46	2%
United Kingdom	24	1%
Germany	24	1%
France	10	<1%
Italy	6	<1%
Switzerland	6	<1%
Spain	6	<1%
Canada	5	<1%
Netherlands	4	<1%
Other	50	3%
Unknown	1729	91%

Demographic breakdown

Readers by professional status	Count	As %
Student > Ph. D. Student	501	26%
Researcher	477	25%
Student > Master	193	10%
Student > Bachelor	180	9%
Other	120	6%
Other	439	23%

Readers by discipline	Count	As %
Agricultural and Biological Sciences	775	41%
Medicine and Dentistry	339	18%
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology	330	17%
Unspecified	98	5%
Chemistry	51	3%
Other	317	17%

Attention Score in Context

This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 3046. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 17 November 2018.

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#180

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Outputs from Science

#13

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Outputs of similar age from Science

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Altmetric has tracked 12,287,675 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 99th percentile: it's in the top 5% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.

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Variation in cancer risk among tissues can be explained by the number of stem cell divisions

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