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Nature Reviews Cancer 8, 875–879 (1 November 2008) | doi:10.1038/nrc2522

Ageing, oxidative stress and cancer: paradigms in parallax

Christopher C. Benz & Christina Yau

Two paradigms central to geroscience research are that aging is associated with increased oxidative stress and increased cancer risk. Therefore, it could be deduced that cancers arising with ageing will show evidence of increased oxidative stress. Recent studies of gene expression in age-controlled breast cancer cases indicate that this deduction is false, posing parallax views of these two paradigms, and highlighting the unanswered question: does ageing cause or simply permit cancer development?