Cancer versus anticancer factors: A review of these factors, health impacts, and awareness

Authors

• Uttam Chowdhury, Shreya Chowdhury The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, 85721, United States

Abstract

Cancer is a disease that is caused when cells begin to divide without stopping and spreading into surrounding tissues by any changes or damage to DNA. Most cancer disease cases are due to environmental risk factors, and many of these factors are controllable lifestyle choices.

Free radicals are risk factors that cause cancer, but antioxidants are anti-risk factors that work as anticancer and protect our health from diseases like cancer. It would be very important to know how these risk and anti-risk factors work, and how we could maintain and protect our health.

Free radicals (FRs) have an unpaired electron in their outer orbit that make them very unstable because they want to keep pair of electrons in their outer orbit, and their reactivity is very strong for that missing electron to become stable. Due to that, FRs attack healthy/normal cells for electrons that they can find to become stable. Free radicals could take electrons from DNA molecules, proteins, fats, carbohydrates, and other molecules, damaging and turning them into new free radicals. In this process, free radical chain reactions damage the entire cell, then their neighbors, and so on. Having too many free radicals in the body increases the likelihood of damage to healthy cells. This resulting damage is called oxidative damage