Cancer Rates Are Rising in Young People

36 y/o male with stage 4 colon cancer. Diagnosed in 2016. Lifelong triathlete / healthy eater. I think it's easy to write this off and just better screening, but I think that's certainly a necessary, but not sufficient explanation.

I'm open to other ideas, but I have to imagine some of this is due to changes in our environment and food supply. plastics everywhere, pesticides in our food, pollution in the air.

This is a bit of a surprise given how the prevalence of smoking and drinking in the younger generations is steadily declining. We also have a lot more effort put into reducing emissions from all industries. The idea that kids of the 70's chain smoking in the smog have lower cancer risk than the teetotaling youth of today is just sad.

The article touched on it a bit, but apparently obesity is a huge contributing factor and is one major area where today's children are far worse off than their historical peers.

I would wager this is more a function of better/earlier detection than anything.

In general deaths from cancer are down considerably. I'm having trouble finding exact stats I want, but believe this is the case for young people as well.

Cases of cancer that result in fatality have been and will always be counted pretty close to 100%, since they will eventually seek medical help.

Cases of cancer that are less serious are more likely to be diagnosed when medical care is good.

The survival rate of cancer is over 50%.

https://marypatcampbell.substack.com/p/cancer-death-rates-by...

It feels like everyday a new paper is published showing either massive levels of compounds that interfere with endocrine system in the blood. Microplastics, being the biggest one. So when I see headlines like this, "Cancer is up in young people." I can't help but sigh and think, this is expected.

I'm not sure what the right course of action here is, but do we really want to continue with a model where we continue pumping new and unknown compounds into our bodies and the ecosystem with little thought to the downstream impacts?

Some of these compounds have made our lives orders of magnitude better and yet they are wreaking havoc in our lives in ways we'll probably never understand.

For anyone actually wanting real probabilities, a quick google on colorectal which the article mentions as the most common cancer for young men:

"For example, 1 out of every 333,000 15-to-19-year-olds developed colorectal cancer in 1999. Colorectal cancer became more common by 2020, when 1 out of every 77,000 teens"

https://www.webmd.com/colorectal-cancer/news/20240515/behind...

"The study found that colorectal cancer diagnoses in children ages 10 to 14 jumped from 0.1 cases per 100,000 in 1999 to 0.6 per 100,000 in 2020, a 500% increase. Cases among 15- to 19-year-olds jumped by more than 300%, from 0.3 per 100,000 to 1.3 cases per 100,000 people. In people ages 20 to 24, cases rose from 0.7 to 2 per 100,000 people, a 185% rise."

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/colon-cancer-rate...

How much of this is explained by the increase in obesity in young adults? I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the first specific cancer TFA mentions is colorectal. In the last sixty years the obesity rate has tripled with morbid obesity growing nearly ten fold.

My "TOE" for cancer (and other chronic diseases):

- stress

- environmental pollutants

- empty calories + nutritional deficiencies (aka "high-calorie malnutrition")

- excessive hygiene and underexposure to pathogens particularly during childhood (even cesarian birth contributes to gut dysbiosis)

- overreliance on pharmaceutical drugs that do more harm than good

All in all a gross misunderstanding of what constitutes health and how the human body works.

For those so inclined, check out Dr. Thomas Seyfried's work on cancer as a metabolic disease: https://www.bc.edu/bc-web/schools/morrissey/departments/biol...

I went thru very aggressive cancer treatment a few years ago (am a woman in my late thirties) for a type that was def not lifestyle caused nor hereditary. So far so good. I have received great care but no one has given me so much as a hypothesis as to what caused it. The type I had is rising amongst women under 50.

If I had to hypothesize, stress and trauma are large contributors. I don't think by any means that previous generations (women in particular) had it 'easier,' but I think the nature and persistence of low-grade psychological stress we carry now is unique. And our support systems are worse.

Beware of the conflict of interest of both authors.

One is "chief executive officer of the American Cancer Society and the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network (ACS CAN)."

The other is "chief executive officer of Color Health, a health care technology company and partner of the American Cancer Society that helps employers, labor unions and public health institutions take action against cancer through preventive health and disease management programs."

Might make sense to net zero tax sugar (and hand consumers the taxes at the end of the year). Obesity is the main correlate according to most of these studies.

My sister had to do a double mastectomy at 35 and almost died on so many occasions throughout the process during the chemotherapy. It's absolutely terrifying.

Ultra-processed foods is the new tabacco or even worse. I wonder how long until we start to see the warnings on each package like on cigarettes.

I find it unlikely to be resolved any time soon and the trend will just get worse. The primary factors in this revolve around difficulty in pursuing dispassionate analysis of all environmental changes impacting people (i.e., topics and even words cannot be discussed or uttered without being canceled from many forums merely for words, not even for "bias"), special interests heavily influencing pretty much everything that has any influence on opinion, oligarchical control over the entire food chain, and regulatory capture at all levels.

Related:

Rising rates of cancer in young people prompts hunt for environmental culprit

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41178776

5 days ago | 97 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41178776

I believe part of this is how good our technology has gotten with detection of cancer. Cancer is a part of everyone as we have roughly 37 trillion cells in our body. Which puts it at a failure rate lower than the computers we maintain on a daily basis. Most of the time our bodies take care of cancer cells when they are in small amounts, sometimes they grow wild and our bodies can't keep up and that is when it gets serious.

as a cancer survivor I would like to add that one of the tragedies with young people is that all too often they ignore symptoms for too long.

I urge you to listen to your body and to take a proactive approach to your health. if something doesn't seem right and a doctor isn't taking you seriously, it's good to push for answers. I was very fortunate that my GP sent me for a proactive X-ray to check something out.

I wonder what our increasingly clean world has to do with this. I think there has been an uptick in autoimmune disorders that has been sometimes attributed to a lack of stuff like dirt and bacteria in our normal environments. I know that gut autoimmune issues are a huge risk factor for colon cancer.

Although, my personal main suspect would be obesity. Cancer and obesity go together really well.

Yeah if possible get screened and when in doubt about something in/on your body please get it checked. I also had to suffer through chemo this year because of metastasis – had I checked sooner I might've gotten away by just having the surgery and no chemo. Last chemo was two months ago, still have side effects, mostly neuropathy. Compared to other patients I shared rooms with I still consider myself lucky but definitely an experience you want to try and avoid (unless you need it, of course). Now hoping my next CT is clean.

I can't comment on causes as I'm not a doctor, in my case all the known causes did not apply to me.

The tendency to explain increase in youth cancer by stress, even among HN readers, is somewhat unsettling to me. It is an almost unfalsifiable explanation, plus, historically, people had a lot of stress too - Gen Z is absolutely not uniquely distressed. Was there an epidemic of youth cancer among Holocaust survivors or people who lived through the terror of the Khmer Rouge? Likely not.

It also tends to conflict with causes of those cancers that we were able to discover, and which are usually almost monocausal, especially in younger age. The main reason for lung cancer isn't stress, but tobacco smoke. The main reason for mesothelioma isn't stress, but exposure to asbestos. The main reason for cervical cancer isn't stress, but HPV infection. The main reason for stomach cancer isn't stress, but Helicobacter pylori infection.

In all likelihood, the current cancer resurgence isn't caused by stress either. I suspect something much more specific, like microplastics.

Stress knocks out your imune system.

PFAs, processed food, WiFi signals, lack of outdoor activities, high levels of stress and experimental vaccines.