Universe Today
"The grandmother would have to be exposed to radiation - which she is all the time - while she is pregnant with the mother of the affected individual. What this is basically implying is that, during a sensitive time in pregnancy, the constant background radiation may cause a chemical change in just the right cell and DNA stretch to lead to future cancer. The background radiation is causing very low level damage all the time to random cells in the body, but anything significant happening to germ cells would lead to a whole organism eventually carrying that damage (or predisposition)," said Dr. Juckett.
Dr. Juckett cautions, "Of course, other explanations could be hypothesized. Standard epidemiological approaches would partition individual cases by risk factors (e.g., smoking, environment pollution, diet, age-at-menarche, family history, etc.). Only when there is no correlation to these would other hypotheses, like cosmic rays be entertained. Unfortunately, to look at the 100-yr data for long-term trends, this kind of information is generally not available. The one thing that seems certain is that the common oscillations in the US, UK, CA, NZ, and AU data suggest a global environmental signal of some kind. This does limit things a bit (e.g., solar radiation effects, cosmic ray effects, global pollution)."
"I cannot of think of anything one can do to protect themselves from their inherited propensities. However, cancer is a multi-step process. It still requires other random 'mutations' to occur during life. Healthy living is still called for. In other words, reducing exposure to toxins, radiation, and injury. Eventually, the biochemical fingerprints of possible inherited changes may be deciphered and then testing could be possible," said Dr. Juckett.