Young Americans in their 20s and 40s are about two and four times more likely to suffer from colon and rectal cancers than their parents and past generations, according to an article in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
“The cancer problems in today's youth are an omen of what will happen to people's health in the future. The discovery that today the likelihood of cancer in young people has returned to the level of the late 19th century, sobering us up. We need to convince doctors and the public that cancer is very dangerous, that it needs to be found early and that everyone needs to eat healthy foods to stop this trend,”said Rebecca Siegel, director of the American Cancer Society in Atlanta, USA).
Cancer of the rectum and colon today is considered one of the main causes of death in developed countries in old age, along with diseases of the heart and blood vessels. According to statistics from the World Cancer Research Foundation (WCRF), almost 1.5 million men and women are diagnosed with this type of cancer every year, approximately 10-20% of whom die due to complications or metastases.
In recent years, Siegel says, the number of deaths from these cancers has dropped markedly in the United States among the elderly due to advances in diagnostic techniques and technologies. On the other hand, doctors began to record another, more alarming trend - the number of cases of rectal and colon cancer among people under the age of 50 began to rise.
Siegel and her colleagues decided to test whether this trend is observed at the national level by analyzing how the statistics on the development of these two forms of cancer among young people have changed over the past four decades. In total, during this time, approximately 500 thousand cases of cancer development have accumulated in Americans aged 20 and over.
The very first analysis of this information revealed extremely alarming trends - it turned out that the likelihood of developing cancer among young people has grown rapidly since the mid-1970s, increasing by 1-2% per year for colon cancer, and by 3% per year for rectal cancer.
These trends were most pronounced among the youngest hospital patients, ages 20-29, and less pronounced among American adults. For older people, as old statistics have shown, the chances of developing both forms of cancer have gradually dropped over the past 50 years.
Such trends, the researchers write, have already led to the fact that the likelihood of developing colon cancer has doubled for people born in the 1990s or 2000s, and rectal cancer has quadrupled. Accordingly, the likelihood of developing cancer for young people aged 25-35 today, not considered a risk group in the past, is almost equal to the chances of acquiring cancer at 60 for their parents.
Promotional video:
Why is this happening? There is no definitive answer to this question yet, but scientists believe that this is due to the spread of unhealthy food, a decrease in the level of physical activity and a deterioration in the environment. Such conclusions, according to Siegel and her colleagues, should convince government agencies and hospitals to include not only the elderly, but also young people in mandatory cancer screenings.