Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands.
Catharina Cancer Institute, Eindhoven, The Netherlands.
Sci Rep. 2021 Jan 11;11(1):349. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-79458-w.
Cancer and pandemics are leading causes of death globally, with severe socioeconomic repercussions. To better understand these repercussions, we investigate similarities between pandemics and cancer and describe the limited growth in number of infections or cancer cells, using mathematical models. For a pandemic, the analysis shows that in most cases, the initial fast growth is followed by a slower decay in the recovery phase. The risk of infection increases due to the airborne virus contact crossing a risk-threshold. For cancers caused by carcinogens, the increasing risk with age and absorbed dose of toxins that cross a risk-threshold, may lead to the disease onset. The time scales are different for both causes of death: years for cancer development and days to weeks for contact with airborne viruses. Contamination by viruses is on a time scale of seconds or minutes. The risk-threshold to get ill and the number-threshold in cancer cells or viruses, may explain the large variability in the outcome. The number of infected persons per day is better represented in log-lin plots instead of the conventional lin-lin plots. Differences in therapies are discussed. Our mathematical investigation between cancer and pandemics reveals a multifactorial correlation between both fragilities and brings us one step closer to understand, timely predict and ultimately diminish the socioeconomic hurdle of both cancer and pandemics.
癌症和大流行病是全球主要的死亡原因，对社会经济造成严重影响。为了更好地了解这些影响，我们通过数学模型来研究大流行病和癌症之间的相似之处，并描述感染或癌细胞数量的有限增长。对于大流行病，分析表明，在大多数情况下，初始快速增长之后是恢复期的较慢衰减。由于空气传播病毒接触超过风险阈值，感染风险会增加。对于由致癌物引起的癌症，由于年龄的增加和接触超过风险阈值的毒素的吸收剂量增加，可能会导致疾病的发生。这两种死亡原因的时间尺度不同：癌症发展需要数年时间，而接触空气传播病毒需要数天到数周的时间。病毒污染的时间尺度在秒或分钟内。患病的风险阈值和癌症细胞或病毒中的数量阈值，可以解释结果的巨大差异。每天感染的人数在对数-线性图中比传统的线性-线性图中表示得更好。还讨论了治疗方法的差异。我们对癌症和大流行病之间的数学研究揭示了两者脆弱性之间的多因素相关性，并使我们更进一步地了解、及时预测并最终减轻癌症和大流行病对社会经济的影响。
