Cancer in Younger People on the Rise | Hacker News Reader

Cancer in Younger People on the Rise

yalemedicine.org

39 pointsj-bos18 comments

Interesting they mention family history is a major factor.

Is it possible that by becoming better at treating cancer, more people with cancer risk genes are having kids, and this is contributing to the rise in cancer rates?

I would be inclined to doubt that as most cancers appear after the age most people have children.

Mutational load caused by the dramatic increase in the age of parents at birth.

It would be great if they obtained patient consent to analyze their medical records. In case you don’t know, in every state, if you get cancer, your medical records are taken without your consent and submitted to state and federal cancer registries, and identifiable medical records can be shared with researchers without your consent.

There is a huge public benefit to analyzing this data.

The patients know this. Asking for consent would still yield the vast majority of the data.

It would also mean more people analyzing it - I know at least one big pharma company that won't touch patient data that was taken without consent because they don't want to be associated with such unethical practices.

Worth more than the right to privacy?

Yes.

My brother died of colon cancer at 42 in 2017 and my grandmother died of the same disease at 62. I started getting colonoscopies at 35. It's good that more information is out there now.

My parents never told us to start getting screened early. I think it's mostly because it just wasn't talked about very much.

Not a single mention of diet or food...

https://twitter.com/travelingenes/status/1773126285633507786

I wonder if this takes into account the number of young people going in to receive cancer-diagnosing tests. Perhaps as a result of news about microplastics, etc. people are generally becoming more worried and therefore more proactive in seeking diagnoses. But more people getting tested results in more cancer diagnoses.

While it's true that more testing finds more cases, if I went to my doctor and said "I read about plastics in the news, please test me for cancer" they would politely say no and send me home. And they specifically say that more people are dying from cancer young, not just being diagnosed. I think we can all agree that dying from cancer is not easy to mix up with other causes of death. So it's probably not like people were dying of cancer and we just didn't notice.

"While researchers determine the cause"...

It's often said human bodies are very tolerant to abuse. But are they? Wouldn't surprise me if (with hindsight, in a few decades or so) such claims will be walked back on.

Ultra-processed foods, microplastics, a variety of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), pesticides, PFAS, medicines flushed in toilets with some of them persistent in environment, heavy metals, 1000s of plastic additives, the list goes on. All of those getting everywhere & with happily interacting, poorly understood effects. And then we're 'surprised' early-onset cancers are on the rise.

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