Cancer is hitting more young people and doctors are “perplexed” by the alarming jump in cases, according to a new report.
of wall street journal reported Thursday that “Cancer is striking more young people in the United States and around the world, confounding doctors.”
According to WSJ, “The U.S. diagnosis rate rose to 107.8 per 100,000 people under age 50 in 2019, a 12.8% increase from 95.6 in 2000, according to federal data.”
The report cites a study published in 2023. BMJ Oncology They found that “between 1990 and 2019, the global incidence of young-onset cancer increased by 79.1%, and the number of deaths from young-onset cancer increased by 27.7%.”
The study found that North America, Australia and Western Europe had the highest rates of cancer in people under 50. Cancer rates among young people were lowest in western sub-Saharan Africa and central sub-Saharan Africa.
The fastest growing cancers worldwide were early-onset nasopharyngeal cancer and prostate cancer.
The study found that early-onset breast, tracheal, bronchial, lung, stomach, and colorectal cancers had the highest mortality rates.
In 2019, one in five new cases of colorectal cancer was under the age of 55, almost double the number in 1995.
According to the report, doctors suspect that the increase in cancer incidence among young people is likely due to decreased physical activity, increased consumption of ultra-processed foods, and intake of new toxins.
“Encouraging a healthy lifestyle may reduce the burden of early-onset cancer disease,” the study's authors said.
“Patients are getting younger,” says Dr. Andrea Selczek, co-director of the program for young-onset gastrointestinal cancer patients at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. “It's probably some kind of environmental change, whether it's something in the food, something in the medicine, or something that hasn't been identified yet.”
“Overall trends indicate that many of the cancers with the greatest increases in early-onset disease are gastrointestinal cancers, including bile duct, colorectal, gastric, appendiceal, and pancreatic cancers. Masu.” Said Sunil D. Kamath — Gastrointestinal oncologist at Cleveland Clinic Taussig Cancer Institute.
“Is this part of a larger trend, or is it just getting unhealthy?” asked Sachin Apte, chief clinical officer at Utah Health University's Huntsman Cancer Institute.
“In our data, we observed something called the birth cohort effect. We found that since 1950, each successive generation had an increased risk of early-onset cancer. People born in 1970 are at higher risk than people born in 1960, and that continues to be the case.” Said Dr. Shuji Ogino — Professor of Pathology and Epidemiology at Harvard Medical School.
In response to a significant increase in the number of infections among young people, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force changed In May 2021, the recommended age for colorectal cancer screening was lowered from 50 to 45. Last year, the task force lowered the breast cancer screening recommendation for average-risk women from age 50 to 40.
The silver lining is that cancer death rates in the U.S. decreased by 33% between 1991 and 2020, according to a report published in . CA: Cancer Journal for Clinicians. A study published Thursday found that about 3.8 million cancer deaths were averted during this period.
“This steady progress is due to reductions in smoking, widespread screening for breast, colorectal, and prostate cancer, and improved treatments such as adjuvant chemotherapy for colon and breast cancer,” the study authors wrote. writing. “More recently, advances in the development of targeted treatments and immunotherapies have accelerated lung cancer mortality far beyond the decline in incidence, and cancers with increasing or stable incidence (leukemia, melanoma, , kidney cancer), which is reflected in a significant reduction in mortality.”
The study found that breast, prostate, and endometrial cancers are on the rise.
The study projects that there will be 1,958,310 new cancer cases and 609,820 cancer deaths in the United States in 2023.
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