National Cancer Prevention Month: What We Can Actually Do to Lower Risk

A February with a job to do

Awareness months work when they turn a vague intention into one booked appointment. February is set aside in the United States for cancer prevention.

The honest framing is narrow. Not every cancer can be prevented. Some risk is written into age, inherited genes, and things that already happened. But a real share of cancer risk sits in things that can still be changed, and those are worth naming precisely rather than gesturing at.

NCI defines prevention as action taken to lower the chance of getting cancer. It notes that about 2 million people in the United States will be diagnosed with cancer in 2025, and points to the financial burden of care alongside the physical and emotional cost.

How a cell turns cancerous

Prevention makes more sense once you know what it is interrupting.

NCI's summary describes the process. Damage to a cell's genetic instructions breaks the controls that normally keep the cell in line. Cells stop dying when they should. New cells get produced when the body does not need them. The extra cells build up into a mass.

Not every mass is cancer. Benign tumor cells stay put. Malignant cells invade nearby tissue and spread elsewhere in the body.

Prevention works at the top of that chain, by removing whatever is doing the damage in the first place.

The four best-established targets

NCI's list of factors known to increase cancer risk has four entries. Each one has something practical attached.

Tobacco. NCI names cigarette smoking as the leading cause of nine cancers: acute myelogenous leukemia, bladder, cervical, esophageal, kidney, lung, oral cavity, pancreatic and stomach. It states that not smoking or quitting lowers both the chance of getting cancer and the chance of dying from it, and that smoking causes about 30 percent of all cancer deaths in the United States. If this applies to you, our page on quitting smoking is the place to start.

Infections. HPV raises the risk of cervical, penile, vaginal, anal and oropharyngeal cancers. Hepatitis B and C raise the risk of liver cancer. Epstein-Barr virus and Helicobacter pylori are also on NCI's list. Two of these have vaccines, which is the closest thing prevention has to a lever you can simply pull. See our page on the HPV vaccine.

Radiation, including ultraviolet light from the sun and ionizing radiation. Our sun safety page covers the everyday version.

Immunosuppressive medicines after an organ transplant. This one is not avoidable, but it changes what a person should be monitored for.

The second tier, and why the wording differs

NCI separately lists factors that may affect cancer risk: diet, alcohol, physical activity, obesity, diabetes, and environmental exposures.

That phrasing is deliberate. These matter, and they matter for plenty of reasons beyond cancer. But the evidence tying any one of them to cancer risk is weaker and harder to separate from everything else about how people live.

Treating tier two as if it were tier one is how prevention advice turns into folklore.

Prevention and screening are different jobs

Screening looks for cancer before symptoms appear. That is detection, not prevention — with one important exception, where removing a colon polyp stops a cancer that had not yet formed.

NCI is direct about the trade-offs. Some screening procedures cause serious problems. False positives create anxiety and lead to further tests with their own risks. False negatives can delay care. And for some cancers, finding and treating early does not improve the chance of cure or help someone live longer.

That is why NCI frames screening as informed and shared decision-making. Our page on cancer screening guidelines by age sets out the general timing.

A February checklist worth acting on

Pick one. Booking a single appointment beats reading a dozen articles.

• If you smoke or vape, ask about a quit plan and the medicines that go with it. Quitting helps at any age and after any number of years.
• Check whether you, or your children, are up to date on HPV and hepatitis B vaccination.
• Ask whether you are due for any screening test, and what the harms of that test are as well as the benefits.
• If a parent, sibling or child has had cancer — particularly young, or more than one relative — ask whether a formal risk assessment is warranted.
• If you drink, ask what a lower-risk amount looks like for you. Our page on alcohol and cancer covers what is known.
• Get a skin change, mouth sore, lump, or persistent cough looked at now rather than in the spring.

What this does not mean

• Prevention shifts probabilities. It does not promise that a careful person avoids cancer, or that a careless one gets it.
• Many risk factors cannot be modified. Age is the largest single one.
• A raised risk factor is not a cause in an individual case, and nobody diagnosed with cancer should be treated as having brought it on themselves.
• Awareness months raise attention, not evidence. What counts is the appointment that follows.
• Nothing here replaces a conversation about your own history. The list that applies to you is shorter and more specific than the list on this page.

Sources

• NCI PDQ: Cancer Prevention Overview (Patient Version)
• NCI: Cancer Causes and Prevention
• NCI PDQ: Cancer Screening Overview (Patient Version)

How this article was prepared

An AI-assisted editorial system helped prepare this page. No named medical reviewer has reviewed it unless one is listed.

Cancer Explained is published by the National Cancer Information Foundation. It is not medical advice and does not suggest a test or treatment.

See an error, old source, or unclear wording? Tell us.