What's really the cause of cancer? Not only patients, but people all around the world seem to don’t have a clue about what cancer really is and does, as a new study observed. The research was published at the International Union Against Cancer’s at the World Cancer Congress in Geneva on August 27. It seems that people tend to blame the environmental causes but not their behavior.

Medically, cancer is a class of diseases in which a group of cells shows uncontrolled growth, invasion and metastasis (the disease spreads to other locations of the body). These are malignant cancers, which are different from the benign tumors. These tumors are self-limited and don’t invade.

Cancer could affect people of any age, even fetuses. Still, the risk of getting infected with the disease increases once with the age. This type of disease causes 13% of all deaths and 7.6 million people died of cancer in 2007.

The disease is usually caused by abnormalities in the genetic material of the transformed cells and these abnormalities could also be the effect of carcinogens as tobacco, radiation and chemicals.

The researchers interviewed 29,925 people in 29 countries. It seems that the ones who live in high-income countries didn’t believe that drinking alcohol increases the risk of cancer. In fact, it’s just otherwise! People in rich countries believed that stress and air pollution were more risky than alcohol, even if none of the things they believed to cause cancer were ever thought to be so.

People everywhere thought that the things they couldn’t control increase the risk of cancer more than the things they do control. This could lead to action cancer education campaigns, as the researchers advised.