There have been recent increases in the rates of some cancers among adults under 50, including breast, colorectal, kidney and uterine cancers. One 2023 paper suggests that these early-onset cancer diagnoses rose by 25% globally between 1990 and 2019, and scientists are still investigating why.
The new study, published June 22 in the journal Nature Medicine, suggests that younger generations may have a wider "gap" between their chronological ages and their biological ages — a measurement of how quickly the body's tissues and systems are aging — than older generations do. The greater gap among younger adults seems to be linked with a higher risk of developing cancer early in life.
"This is really proof-of-concept," study co-author Yin Cao, a molecular and clinical epidemiologist at the Washington University School of Medicine and Siteman Cancer Center, told Live Science.
Scientists have increasingly used these summary measures in an attempt to understand why some people are more prone to age-related diseases than others. To check whether there could be a link between biological age and the rise in early cancers, the new study analyzed data from more than 150,000 adults in the UK Biobank, a long-running project that has been tracking the health of about half-a-million U.K. adults since the mid‑2000s.
"The traditional approach is really focusing on individual risk factors" for cancer, such as a history of obesity or a high intake of ultraprocessed foods, Cao said. "We are testing whether we can leverage these large biobanks and potentially find some biological imprint as a potential reflection of many exposures that can be linked with cancer risk," she said.
The researchers applied this same approach to about 10,000 participants in the U.S. National Institutes of Health's All of Us Research Program, another large biobank. There, they found a more pronounced pattern: People born between 1990 and 1999 had age gaps about 0.92 standard deviations higher than those born between 1965 and 1969.
One type of cancer that's on the rise in adults under 50 is breast cancer. (Image credit: kali9 via Getty Images)
Real trend or data mirage?
In the UK Biobank cohort, the researchers found that participants with higher age gaps were more likely to develop early-onset solid cancers, meaning cancerous tumors that appear in tissues, rather than "liquid" cancers present in bodily fluids. This link was strongest for lung, gastrointestinal and uterine cancers. This finding was based on the patients' medical records.
To probe deeper, the authors used a different model that estimates biological aging at the level of specific organs and systems, using patterns of proteins in the blood. In almost 20,000 UK Biobank participants, they found that markers suggesting an "older-than-expected" immune system were linked with a higher risk of early-onset lung cancer. Similarly, markers suggesting older-than-expected fat tissue were linked with a higher risk of early-onset colorectal cancer.
The patterns will need to be confirmed in other datasets and populations, Cao noted. Biological aging tests, including PhenoAge, are also relatively new, and their implications aren't fully understood. While they clearly capture something about health and risk at the population level, at the individual level, different biological age tests can give very different answers for the same person. That raises questions about what any single score really means for individual health.
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As with any observational study using large databases, it is hard to untangle cause and effect, Nangalia added.
Cao hopes her team's approach will serve as another useful tool to figure out why more young people are getting cancer. " Hopefully this is just a starting point," Cao said.
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