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posted by on Wednesday March 01 2017, @04:16PM   Printer-friendly
from the too-much-sitting-on-our-asses dept.

A new study finds that compared to people born around 1950, when colorectal cancer risk was lowest, those born in 1990 have double the risk of colon cancer and quadruple the risk of rectal cancer.

The study is led by American Cancer Society scientists and appears in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. It finds colorectal cancer (CRC) incidence rates are rising in young and middle-aged adults, including people in their early 50s, with rectal cancer rates increasing particularly fast. As a result, three in ten rectal cancer diagnoses are now in patients younger than age 55.

To get a better understanding, investigators led by Rebecca Siegel, MPH of the American Cancer Society used "age-period-cohort modeling," a quantitative tool designed to disentangle factors that influence all ages, such as changes in medical practice, from factors that vary by generation, typically due to changes in behavior. They conducted a retrospective study of all patients 20 years and older diagnosed with invasive CRC from 1974 through 2013 in the nine oldest Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) program registries. There were 490,305 cases included in the analysis.

The study found that after decreasing since 1974, colon cancer incidence rates increased by 1% to 2% per year from the mid-1980s through 2013 in adults ages 20 to 39. In adults 40 to 54, rates increased by 0.5% to 1% per year from the mid-1990s through 2013.

Also at The New York Times

Study: Colorectal cancer incidence patterns in the United States, 1974-2013; J Natl Cancer Inst (2017) 109(8): DOI: 10.1093/jnci/djw322


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  • (Score: 2) by Zz9zZ on Wednesday March 01 2017, @10:50PM (1 child)

    by Zz9zZ (1348) on Wednesday March 01 2017, @10:50PM (#473586)

    Corporate cost cutting has led to a ton of questionable methods, specifically you should recall the outrage over the pink slime "meat" of fast food burgers. The study consists of diagnosed cases, so the only way enhanced testing would factor into this is if people in the 70's were dying from such cancer and no one figured out the cause of death. Since the increase was strongest in younger adults this does not seem likely, if someone died of cancer in their 20s/30s I'm sure the coroner would find out it was cancer. Untreated it is a pretty brutal and quick disease.

    Again you just want to grind your axe because you don't like hearing potentially negative comments about how large corporations are harming the public. You raise reasonable but usually false flags, in this case I feel perfectly fine saying observational bias is not the problem. In fact, I think you're trying to say "incomplete/inaccurate data" and not "observational bias", and as I indicated above the data is pretty easy and accurate to gather even for those primitive 1970s docs.

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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 01 2017, @11:06PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday March 01 2017, @11:06PM (#473600) Journal

    so the only way enhanced testing would factor into this is if people in the 70's were dying from such cancer and no one figured out the cause of death.

    Or they died of something else first. Let's keep in mind that cancer doesn't instantly cause health problems. It is routinely possible now to detect slow growing cancerous growths decades before it can impact someone's health. And if they die of something else before the cancer is even detectable using 1950s technology, then we have a case which 1950 era medicine would have outright ignored.