Younger generations may be aging faster than their predecessors, and this may be linked to a rise in early-onset cancers, a new study suggests.
There have been recent increases in the rates of some cancers among adults under 50, including breast, colorectal, kidney and uterine cancers. One 2023 paper suggests that these early-onset cancer diagnoses rose by 25% globally between 1990 and 2019, and scientists are still investigating why.
"The trend of increased cancers at younger ages is very real, and it is not simply because of more efficient diagnosis, or diagnosis at earlier stages," said Dr. Jyoti Nangalia, a hematologist and cancer researcher at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in the U.K. who was not involved in the new study. "It is possible that we are being exposed to new cancer-causing risks or that [our] defences to them are somehow altered," she told Live Science in an email.
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