There are 41 officially recognized types of cancer. GenXers and Millennials have been found to suffer significantly higher risk of 17 of them. And cancer rates continue to rise in successively younger generations. The reasons why remain unclear…
It’s shocking news – frightening, if you fall within one of those generations. And not knowing what’s behind this trend makes it impossible to take substantive countervailing measures.
Numbers don’t lie
A new large-scale study led by researchers at the American Cancer Society (ACS) suggests incidence rates continued to rise in successively younger generations in 17 of the 34 cancer types. Breast, pancreatic, and gastric cancers are spotlighted. Mortality trends also increased in conjunction with the incidence of liver (female only), uterine corpus, gallbladder, testicular, and colorectal cancers.
“These findings add to growing evidence of increased cancer risk in post-Baby Boomer generations, expanding on previous findings of early-onset colorectal cancer and a few obesity-associated cancers to encompass a broader range of cancer types,” said Dr. Hyuna Sung, lead author of the study. “Birth cohorts, groups of people classified by their birth year, share unique social, economic, political, and climate environments, which affect their exposure to cancer risk factors during their crucial developmental years.
Perhaps the most dismaying news, Sung notes, is: “Although we have identified cancer trends associated with birth years, we don’t yet have a clear explanation for why these rates are rising.”
Historical records
The researchers mounted a massive data mining analysis of two huge longitudinal surveys. The first followed 23,654,000 patients diagnosed with 34 types of cancer, and mortality data from 7,348,137 deaths for 25 types of cancer for individuals aged 25-84 years for the period Jan 1, 2000, to Dec 31, 2019, from the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries and the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics.
To reveal previous generations’ statistics, the team calculated calculated birth cohort-specific incidence rate ratios and mortality rate ratios, using public health information, by birth years, separated by five-year intervals, from 1920 to 1990.
You could hardly get a more comprehensive picture from any other source.
Disturbing pattern
A disturbing pattern emerged from the analysis, dating back as far as the statistics went – 1920. Since that early date, the incidence of a wide range of cancers has steadily increased, along with mortality rates from them. Steadily through the past 100 years.
But incidence rates have increased faster, and across more cancer types, since 1955. The trend becomes extreme in folks born since 1990.
And that leads the ACS to recommend not only further investigation, but immediate planning top increase government health care spending to accommodate an explosion of cancer as Millennials, GenXers, GenYs and Gen Zs age.
My take
But I have a theory – at least about what researchers should be looking at first in ‘further investigations’.
I also see a pattern, or progression, in eating habits that parallels the upward creep in cancer incidence and mortality over the past century.
The upward trend in cancer pretty closely parallels the meteoric rise in the popularity and availability of processed foods from the post-WWI period to today. There was a bump in processed food proliferation in the post-WW II era, which corresponds to the acceleration in cancer rates the researchers noted after 1955.
And, if you graph the consumption of processed foods and UPFs since 1990, you’ll see a marked steepening of the line.
The general opinion among physicians and nutritionists today is that we’re in the midst of a processed food epidemic. Which parallels the increasing cancer risk for succeeding younger generations.
It’s obvious, to me anyway, that cancer researchers should put aside other potential avenues of investigation and concentrate on diet-related issues…
~ Maggie J.