Although cancer can occur at any age in a person’s life, most types of cancer become more common as we age. It’s a simple explanation: our cells can get damaged over the years. In 2020 alone, cancer has represented the cause of nearly one in six deaths that occurred.
In other words, eating well, working out, getting enough sleep, and taking good care of our health overall is a ‘must.’ But a new study that ScienceAlert writes about comes to bring us some bad news about the prevalence of cancer diagnostics across the world.
Much more adults under 50 years of age have developed cancer since 1990
The number of those individuals who have to deal with cancer and are under 50 years of age has increased a lot since 1990. What’s perhaps even more frightening is that the statistic is not only speaking about patients from a single country or continent.
Shuji Ogino, who’s a pathologist and epidemiologist at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, explained:
We found that this risk is increasing with each generation,
For instance, people born in 1960 experienced higher cancer risk before they turn 50 than people born in 1950 and we predict that this risk level will continue to climb in successive generations.
14 cancer types were taken into account for the new research: prostate, stomach, breast, colorectal (CRC), extrahepatic bile duct, esophageal, pancreas, gallbladder, head and neck, kidney, liver, bone marrow, endometrial, and thyroid cancer.
Tomotaka Ugai, an epidemiologist from Harvard Medical School, explained:
The food we eat feeds the microorganisms in our gut. Diet directly affects microbiome composition and eventually, these changes can influence disease risk and outcomes.
The World Health Organization (WHO) also tells us that many types of cancer can be cured if they’re detected early and treated in the right way.
The new study was published in Nature Reviews Clinical Oncology.