Cancer Cases Rising ‘Dramatically’ in Adults Under 50
Globally, the number of cancer cases diagnosed in adults under 50 has surged in recent decades, and a new study suggests that diagnosis rates are climbing too much to be entirely explained by better screening or earlier detection.The incidence of several early-onset cancers, including tumors of the breast, colon, esophagus, kidney, liver, and pancreas, has dramatically increased around the world since 1990, researchers report in Nature Reviews Clinical Oncology.“From our data, we observed something called the birth cohort effect. This effect shows that each successive group of people born at a later time — for example, a decade-later — have a higher risk of developing cancer later in life, likely due to risk factors they were exposed to at a young age,” senior study author Shuji Ogino, MD, PhD, a…