2024-08-07 15:15:55
It is a worrying development: more and more young people around the world are getting cancer. Researchers have investigated which types of tumors occur most frequently.
Cancer was long considered a disease of old age, but it is increasingly striking people at a younger age. This is the conclusion of a large-scale study from the USA. According to the study, millennials – people born between 1981 and 1996 – are two to three times more likely to develop certain types of cancer than the baby boomer generation.
Researchers at the American Cancer Society (ACS) in Atlanta evaluated the medical records of 23.6 million US citizens aged 25 to 84. All of them had been diagnosed with cancer between 2000 and 2019. From this, they calculated the incidence rates for various types of cancer in each age group.
The result: In 17 of the 34 types of cancer examined, the incidence rate increased with each successive generation. It was striking that millennials were two to three times more likely to develop the following types of cancer than baby boomers:
But liver cancer, breast cancer, colon cancer, bladder cancer and ovarian cancer are also increasingly affecting younger people today.
“These results support the growing evidence of increased cancer risk in post-baby boomer generations,” said study author Dr. Hyuna Sung in an ACS press release. Depending on the type of cancer, millennials are between 12 and 167 percent more likely to develop cancer than previous generations. This also means that some types of cancer now occur primarily in younger and middle-aged people between 30 and 54 years of age. These include colon cancer, stomach cancer, and in women, ovarian cancer and uterine cancer.
But why are so many young people getting cancer these days? “So far we have no clear explanation as to why the rates are rising,” say the researchers. But they emphasize: “The rising cancer rates of the younger generations indicate that there must have been an increased exposure to carcinogenic factors in these generations’ early childhood or young adulthood.”
They assume that part of the increase could be due to the increasing obesity and the rather unhealthy lifestyle in this age group. 10 of the 17 types of cancer with increasing frequency in younger generations are closely linked to overweight and obesity – including colon and stomach cancer, pancreatic cancer, liver cancer and breast cancer. And in fact, the number of children and young people with weight problems and incipient metabolic diseases has increased sharply in recent decades.
However, researchers say that more data is needed to explain the increased number of some types of cancer. This is also necessary to be able to estimate future developments. It is still unclear whether this trend will continue and whether, for example, Generation Z will also develop cancer earlier and more frequently than previous generations.