Cancer cases in young adults rise by 80% globally | Hacker News Reader

Cancer cases in young adults rise by 80% globally

indianexpress.com

28 pointsBrajeshwar26 comments

I can't be the only one who sees the irony in this article? Every single mention of the word "cancer" is hyperlinked for SEO purposes... which by definition is cancer in of itself.

This sentence in the article is "tip top",

> On a personal level, there are many things you can do to reduce your risk of developing cancer. Following a healthy lifestyle remains important. This includes eating a healthy diet, stopping smoking, exercising regularly, reducing your alcohol intake, being safe in the sun and maintaining a healthy weight. If something doesn’t feel right with your body or you experience any new symptoms, it’s important to see a doctor as soon as you can.

As someone already mentioned, here is the link the official study,

https://bmjoncology.bmj.com/content/2/1/e000049

A lot of the risk factors in the article seem pretty straightforward - with high fasting glucose being a big one, which basically means diet and exercise. Not a massive surprise that this rise basically seems to correspond to the amount of sugar added to everything having risen so much over that time, as well as the amounts of highly processed carbs (I'm not keto or anything but definitely try to eat whole grains instead of refined grains as much as possible and things like that). Obviously drinking less alcohol and stopping smoking are the two biggest reductions for the largest rest risk factors for many types of cancer as the article points out.

But one thing I found surprising is that they actually call out a 'diet low in milk' as a significant risk factor. I'm actually pretty on board with that, especially eating yoghurt, but there seems to be such a huge trend in going for alternative plant-based milks and just a big assumption that milk must be totally unhealthy... So I just found that very interesting.

"They found that in 2019, there were 3.26 million cases of early-onset cancer diagnosed worldwide – a 79% increase since 1990"

Or you know, it could be that early-onset cancer diagnosis simply improved but that wouldn't make for some shitty clickbait.

Not to mention that world population went up by 60% in that period, so it would have been very strange if cancer diagnoses had stayed at the same number.

The article isn’t good about terminology but it it’s incidence rates.

That was my gut reaction too, minus the overconfident snark. Later the article claims that cancer deaths are also up 28% so it seems unlikely that this is the full story.

That could still be due to increased detection.

Seems unlikely to my layman perspective. Tumors aren’t hard to identify in an autopsy. Do we really think we have gotten so much better at detecting cancers proactively that led to death that would not have been discovered after it killed them?

Do you think all deaths are autopsied? https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/autopsy-rate

No, but I don’t think that you can get 30% more deaths from young people from a failure to measure cause of death. You can caveat that to western society if you want.

Yeah that's part of it, but to easy to dismiss it as such.

Breast cancer for instance also has been on the rise for the last century, and that's pretty hard not to diagnose:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9038417/

One of the most interesting facts I've read in breast cancer studies is that not breast feeding in twenties seems be a pretty high risk factor for developing breast cancer.

source, please

The closest I've seen to that is that having children (with each additional child providing a bit more) adds a protective effect.

https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/h....

The risk of breast cancer declines with the number of children borne. Women who have given birth to five or more children have half the breast cancer risk of women who have not given birth

many thanks - that's an interesting correlation! and the first I've heard of it. If there is a causal relationship here then that would surely account for a certain percentage of the change in cancer rate under discussion here, as women (in developed countries) tend to get their children ever later in life, and fewer of them.

linked article in comment also mentions it: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9038417/

Or you know, cancer rates are actually going up.

To be clear, what you describe would be people that get cancer anytime before 50 then either die without knowing its cancer or live with it until they are 50+ and get diagnosed.

That, combined with more widespread, accurate, and centralized systems of medical recording are almost certainly the reason for purported "rise", though there are probably specific cancers that are really more prevalent now, like colon cancer.

Flagged. Why is every article about cancer submitted to HN completely devoid of any links to studies? Doesn't that immediately throw a red flag to the submitter? Isn't it obvious that, over a 30 year period, we would naturally get better at screening for and diagnosing cancers earlier in peoples' lives?

The study I'm guessing this article is referring to (linked by jl6) uses the misleading term "incidence" which implies (to an untrained reader) that younger people are actually getting cancer at a higher rate. The more accurate term for layperson understanding would be that "discovery" of cancer has increased in younger people. In that case, the study is welcome news - when you discover cancer earlier in life, you can deal with it before it become metastatic (in some cases).

There are some studies which do suggest a real problem here with specific types of cancers - like colon cancer, which really does seem to be increasing in incidence because more young people are actually dying from it as a percentage of the population. But this linked article is mostly clickbait.

A lot of the comments I'm seeing seem to be trying to dismiss this out of hand. But why is it so hard to believe? We haven't exactly been treating the planet or ourselves that well over the last few decades. Hasn't obesity also risen dramatically (and not just in the US) over the last 30 years as well? Would that be so hard to believe? And wouldn't it also be a potential cause of cancer and other disease?

It’s probably because the article is quite sloppy. It doesn’t link to the original study. It doesn’t discuss anything about how diagnosis rates and incidence rates might differ (e.g. increased screening / better medical care). It reports a global figure without attempting to disaggregate, so we don’t know if this is a dramatic change across the globe or driven by improving healthcare in developing countries that previously weren’t diagnosing cancers reliably.

I personally beleive that weight gain among young adults are one big contributing factor.

In the future we will look at obesity the same as smoking today.

This seems to be the study:

https://bmjoncology.bmj.com/content/2/1/e000049

> Encouraging a healthy lifestyle could reduce early-onset cancer disease burden

Reducing the intake of PFAS on your kitchenware, microplastics in your water, 6PPD-quinona from your children's playground and car tires, etc.

Its not young adults. Its under 50s

> The study found there’s been a nearly 80% increase in the number of under-50s being diagnosed with cancer globally in the last three decades.

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