Cancer incidence rising among adults under 50, new report finds, leaving doctors puzzled and worried | CNN
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Cancer patients are “increasingly shifting from older to middle-aged individuals,” according to a report released Wednesday by the American Cancer Society.

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“I was 34 years old, in what I would consider incredible health. I worked out five to six days a week, very low body fat, ate really healthy, and was in no pain or anything, but I noticed some clotted blood in my stool on a few different occasions,” said Herting, who is now 44 and married to Amber. He added that his father was diagnosed with stage I colon cancer in his early 50s but said he had no other known family history of the disease.

Herting’s journey of battling early-onset cancer is an experience shared by a growing proportion of young adults.

Cancer patients are “increasingly shifting from older to middle-aged individuals,” according to a report released Wednesday by the American Cancer Society.

Among adults 65 and older, adults 50 to 64 and those younger than 50, “people aged younger than 50 years were the only one of these three age groups to experience an increase in overall cancer incidence” from 1995 to 2020, says the report, which was published in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians.

Even though the overall US population is aging, “we’re seeing a movement of cancer diagnosis into younger folks, despite the fact that there are more people that are in the older populations,” said Dr. William Dahut, chief scientific officer for the American Cancer Society.

“So cancer diagnoses are shifting earlier,” he said. “There’s something going on here.”

  • lennybird@lemmy.worldEnglish
    31·
    10 months ago

    Cancer is the result of a lot of things. At its core, it’s a system run-amok due to:

    • Oxidation / free radicals.
    • Ionizing radiation damage.
    • Anything else that can damage the DNA itself (eg, asbestos).
    • Natural mutation / degradation having a cascading effect (copy of a copy).

    Cancer happens every day in your body, but most mutations are easily identified and your Killer T (and natural killer) Cells eliminate them or they self-destruct (gross oversimplification, certainly). Cancer arises when there’s a perfect storm that impacts these systems at a scale that can’t be contained.

    Stress is certainly one aspect of this. Chronic inflammation, chronic cortisol, CRP, etc… Is very taxing on the body.

    So generally: don’t stress your body out, don’t expose yourself to anything that damages your DNA acutely, and don’t so anything that requires a lot of turnover of new cells.