Dr. Carole Myers
Welcome to HealthConnections. The show about people health and policy. I'm Dr Carole Myers. The number of young adults getting cancer is alarming. The incidence of early onset cancers in women under age 50 is 82% higher than in men, and the rate of cancer in this group is up 51% since 2002. And we're talking about serious cancers: colorectal cancer, breast cancer, prostate cancer, uterine cancer and pancreatic cancer. Furthermore, it's predicted that cancer among young adults will increase 30% from 2019 to 2030. Michael Holtz, a senior Communications and Marketing Specialist at Oak Ridge Associated Universities, is here to help us begin to unravel the questions that need to be asked and what can be done. Can you offer additional insight on cancer in young adults, or what we sometimes call early onset cancer.
Michael Holtz
There is a rising increase in cancers among patients under 40. Women, as you said, carry the burden of that. And you know this is a population that has most of their lives ahead of them, their most productive years. They're post puberty, but pre perimenopause, menopause, menopause, andropause, all of those things. So, their most productive and busiest years are in front of them, and that's also part of the challenge. Because they're busy, they're not as focused on their health as they might otherwise be, especially if they're older.
What are some of the hypotheses about what is going on?
There are several. So, one of the biggest is environmental exposures. We spend a lot of time in environments with plastics, with chemicals that create everything from food packaging to the furnishings that we sit on, to the materials that make up our homes. Ultra processed foods is another hypothesis. Historically, ultra processed foods weren't part of the equation. It's only been in the last 20 to 30 years that most western diets have become predominantly ultra processed foods, and then you have obesity and metabolic syndrome, as well as just changes in the gut biome. And scientists are trying to figure out what of those changes could be leading to things like the increased incidence of colorectal cancer.
It's going to be unlikely that we find a silver bullet, that there's one cause. It's going to be a confluence of things associated with our modern living.
It's really like the cancer puzzle in general. There isn't one cure, because there are 100+ different kinds of cancer, and they all work different ways. The causes, I think, are going to be the same thing. It's not just one thing. It is a combination.
Let's pick up on another point that you mentioned. How does cancer in young adults differ from cancer in older adults?
It is often diagnosed at later stages, so they sort of put those symptoms off. And they're not helped by the fact that oftentimes medical providers dismiss the symptoms as well.
So we're understanding the problem. In a future episode, we'll need to look at what we can do about the problem.
Absolutely.
