People tend to get risk factors and cause mixed up, so before we dive into this article, we’re going to define what a risk factor is. A risk factor is not something that will definitively result in a disease like cancer. Rather, it’s something that increases a person’s chances of getting cancer. Risk factors are different from ‘cause’ because instead of being something that will directly result in kidney cancer, they are simply factors that increase a person’s risk.
Related Topics (Ads):
In some cases these risk factors can be altered, like smoking, but other times they cannot be. For example gender and race are something that can’t be changed. Also, having one or even several of these risk factors does not mean that you will get cancer, it simply means you’re at an increased risk. There have been many instances when a person does develop something like kidney cancer, and yet doesn’t have any or many of the risk factors on this list.
With that being said, it’s still important to be informed on what the risk factors are, so here’s a look at several known factors that make a person more likely to develop kidney cancer…
1. Age, Race and Gender
These are two risk factors that are extremely general and by no means should be judged on their own as a risk for kidney cancer. However, WebMD notes that for some unknown reason, men are twice as likely to develop kidney cancer than women. Also, there are higher rates of kidney cancer among African Americans than any other race.
When it comes to age, it seems the older a person is the higher their risk because kidney cancer is typically found in adults between the ages of 50 and 70, writes Cancer.Net.