Cancer Is Rising Among Young People — Doctors Discover a Clue as to Why

The Trend: Cancer is increasingly showing up earlier in life. Globally, the number of cancer cases diagnosed before age 50 increased by 79.1% between 1990 and 2019, according to a study analyzing data from the Global Burden of Disease study. Certain cancers, including colorectal cancer, lead the increase: people born in the 1990s have at least a fourfold higher risk of early-onset colorectal cancer than people born in the 1960s, across Australia, Canada, England and the U.S. Other cancers, including uterine, lung, and gastrointestinal, are also being diagnosed earlier.

What People Are Saying: Theories range from microplastic poisoning to air pollution to ultra-processed food consumption. The reality is less tidy: Researchers suspect a combination of exposures and lifestyle changes, but no single culprit has been identified. A new Nature Medicine study offers a biological clue. Researchers analyzed more than 154,000 people and found that newer generations showed greater “biological age acceleration” — meaning their bodies appeared older than their chronological age. 

What to Know: The research in Nature Medicine suggests that people are aging faster, and this remained the case even after the scientists accounted for established cancer risk factors, like smoking cigarettes. What still remains a question, however, is the driver (or drivers) behind this accelerated aging.