This book offers an overview of the epidemiology and primary prevention for most forms of human cancer It summarizes concepts and methods of epidemiology the biology of cancer cancer genetics and the emerging potential of biomarkers It also reviews specific cancer sites in a consistent way providing clinical and pathological outlines descriptive epidemiology and a comprehensive account of traditional and molecular risk factors and their etiological importance To facilitate reading and use of our Textbook as a reference we have consistently addressed potential risk factors in the same order throughout all site specific chapters Acknowledging that any causal inference has an element of subjectivity we have also attempted to classify the strength of existing evidence into distinct categories for each cancer site An epilogue summarizes the major contributions that epidemiology has made in the last few decades to our understanding of the causes of cancer and speculates about future developments
