Figure 4. The probability of and time until cancer initiation prior to death.
(a) and (b) The panels display the probability of cancer initiation from a single compartment of cells, pi, before death of the patient due to causes other than the cancer type of interest. The panels are plotted on a semilogarithmic plane for clarity. The probability of cancer initiation increases with α and decreases with β. (c) and (d) The panels display the expected time of cancer initiation, conditioned on initiation occurring before death of the patient. (a) and (c) We vary the shape parameter α, which governs the decay rate on the right of the distribution (i.e. advantageous mutations). (b) and (d) We vary the shape parameter β, which governs the decay rate on the left of the distribution (i.e. deleterious mutations). The aging process L is fit to US life expectancy data [57] and parameters are u = 0.001 and N = 10.