HPV-related throat cancers are rising, but risks can be lowered by avoiding tobacco, limiting alcohol, getting vaccinated, and eating healthily.
Throat cancer, specifically oropharyngeal cancer, is one of the fastest-growing types of cancer today. It falls under the broader category of head and neck cancers and can be classified into two distinct groups: cancers associated with human papillomavirus (HPV) and those that are not. The treatment approach varies depending on whether the cancer is HPV-related or non-HPV-related.
According to Katharine Price, M.D., a medical oncologist at the Mayo Clinic Comprehensive Cancer Center in Rochester, there are three ways to lower your risk and help prevent head and neck cancers.
Tobacco and alcohol use increase the risk of non-HPV tumors, while HPV is responsible for about 70% of head and neck cancers.
“What’s important about that is they have different biology and are much more treatable, meaning they respond better to treatments and tend to have a higher cure rate. We’re sort of treating those differently than how we treat some of the non-HPV cancers,” Dr. Price says.
Preventive Measures Against Throat Cancer
Surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy are all treatment options, but Dr. Price says it is better to reduce the risks of infection.
“The big three: no smoking tobacco use, minimizing alcohol,l and then HPV vaccination,” she says.
“We know that smoking and alcohol are big risk factors for head and neck cancer if you do both. This increases your risk even more,” Dr. Price says.
And she encourages eating a healthy diet.
“We really should be striving to have a good whole-food diet, trying to minimize eating processed foods and refined sugars,” Dr. Price says.
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3 Comments
It’s funny that this article doesn’t mention that HPV gets in the throat from oral sex, and is more common in gay men. So abstaining from oral sex should be a recommendation, which makes more sense than recommending eating whole grains. Although I suppose you can’t have oral sex while eating whole grains, so maybe that’s why they recommended that.
“HPV-related throat cancers are rising, …”
It is a glaring oversight to not mention the throat cancers as likely being STDs becoming more common with changes in sexual activity among both homosexual AMD heterosexual partners.
Too typically (universally?), it seems, the research fails to factor-in nearly subclinical non-IgE-mediated food (minimally) allergy reactions (Dr. Arthur F. Coca by 1935), FDA approved food poisoning (soy [late 1960s], TBHQ [1972] and MSG [1980], minimally) and excessive related/resultant medical errors. As a senior lay adult American lifetime non-smoker raised in a smoking household and exposed to secondhand smoke on the job in public places until those were banned, and a former heavy drinker and something of a ‘worse’ but not ‘worst’ case scenario victim of all three above those, I’ve never become as chronically ill from tobacco or alcohol as I have from good quality foods (e.g., beef, chicken, pork, minimally) illegally adulterated with FDA approval. “Experience-based,” as opposed to fatally-flawed “evidence-based,” I think if Dr. Price were to look she’d find head and neck cancers are rising in accordance with the consumption of toxic food additives which weaken one’s resistance to infections of all kinds being foisted on an unsuspecting public, with the cooking oil preservative TBHQ, perhaps, being the worst of the lot lately.