Columnist suggests three strategies that could possibly reduce your risk of contracting cancer

By employing three strategies, you may reduce your cancer risk. 

That, at least, is the opinion of Dr. Jerry Saliman, whose Senior Life column in an earlier-this-month edition of j. the Jewish News of Northern California, focused on those strategies — being on the lookout, catching symptoms early, and paying attention to risky behavioral factors.

Dr. Jerry Saliman

Regarding the first strategy, Saliman writes that unfortunately only four types of cancer screening have received a high-level record recommendation from a U.S. task force: colon, lung, breast, and cervix.

As to the second line of reasoning, the columnist, a Bay Area physician who retired from Kaiser South San Francisco after a 30-year career and now is a volunteer internist at Samaritan House Medical Clinic in San Mateo, suggests that "by catching cancer early, the survival rates may be four times higher compared with later-stage detection."

Saliman adds, about the last strategy, that the American Cancer Society's prevention studies have been crucial in detailing risk factors — including, in the 1950s, being the first to identify smoking as a major reason for cancer. The ACS has since, via its ongoing research, "found that older age and smoking have the highest relative risk for developing any cancer for both men and women."

Additional risks for men, his column says, "are family history of cancer, red meat consumption, alcohol intake, and physical inactivity."

More information on risks can be found in Rollercoaster: How a man can survive his partner's breast cancer, a VitalityPress book that I, Woody Weingarten, aimed at male caregivers.