When cancer targets the young:
Cancer is usually a curse of time. In the United States, the vast majority of cancer diagnoses are in people over age 50. Our bodies' cells accumulate DNA damage over time, and older immune systems are not as good at making repairs. At the same time, decades of interaction with sunlight, tobacco products, alcohol, carcinogenic chemicals and other risk factors also take their toll.
But in recent years, cancer has been increasingly attacking younger adults. Global incidence rates of several types of cancer are rising in people in their 20s, 30s and 40s, many with no family history of the disease. Scientists don't know why diagnoses are soaring in people under age 50, and they are racing to find out. But as freelance journalist Fred Schwaller reports in this issue, identifying how risk factors like diet or environmental exposures could be at fault is notoriously difficult because there are so many potential influences at play.
For one, cancers in young adults may advance much more quickly than they do in older people, belying the assumption that healthy young bodies would excel at eradicating malignant cells.
What's more, cancer screening recommendations in many countries aren't currently designed to detect the disease in younger people. Young adult patients often say their concerns that something wasn't right are dismissed by doctors who say they are "too young to have cancer," even when they repeatedly voice their concerns. And that can lead to delayed diagnosis and treatment.
[...] Harsh treatments like radiation and chemotherapy can damage immature egg cells and cells that make sperm, making it impossible for some people who had cancer in childhood to have biological children. Teenage and adult patients may be able to freeze eggs or sperm, but children who haven't gone through puberty don't have those options. Senior writer Meghan Rosen reports on emerging research intended to help make that possible, including a conversation with the first childhood cancer survivor to have testicular stem cells transplanted back into his body.
Parents of children with cancer are increasingly considering these options for both boys and girls. And while scientists say the work is still in its infancy, they hope more childhood cancer survivors will one day have the option to thrive as parents.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 24, @05:41AM (6 children)
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/04/18/health/cancer-colon-breast-screening-young-wellness [cnn.com]
Bowel cancer rates are declining in people over 50. But why are they going up in younger adults?
https://theconversation.com/bowel-cancer-rates-are-declining-in-people-over-50-but-why-are-they-going-up-in-younger-adults-257728 [theconversation.com]
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2045(24)00600-4/fulltext [thelancet.com]
Why are so many young people getting cancer?
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00720-6 [nature.com]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday September 24, @06:11AM
Maybe from the chapter of "when the people die younger of cancer"?
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Snospar on Wednesday September 24, @07:05AM (3 children)
Here in the UK there is bowel screening for the over 50's. This happens every 2 years and there is a lot of encouragement to take part as earlier diagnosis leads to much better outcomes including less invasive treatments.
There is little to no screening available to young people because the incidence of cancer has been very low - maybe this needs to change. As ever, who will fund it?
Huge thanks to all the Soylent volunteers without whom this community (and this post) would not be possible.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Wednesday September 24, @10:29AM
Similar in SE. Cancer screenings when you turn 50s, aorta screenings (not cancer) in your 60s. Women tends to get called earlier for breast cancer, not quite sure when. They also tend to get more checkups and get called more often. Usually when they start to have children. Which is before 50 normally. You can get screened earlier if you or doctors want it, it could be common cancer in the family etc that gets it started earlier. This is just when they start to send you offers for it, it's "free" (as in paid by taxes). You don't have to go if you don't want to.
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Wednesday September 24, @09:48PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 25, @09:51PM
The issue there is that if you drop the age on screening unnecessarily you can see an uptick in related injuries. It's probably less of an issue with colonoscopies than with things that involve a bunch of radiation, but the number of people hurt or killed as a result of colonoscopies isn't zero either.
I definitely am not up on the specifics of this, but I wouldn't be surprised if makes sense to lower the age recommendations on it. The safety and efficacy of the screenings is probably better than in the past, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were more cases at younger ages to justify it.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Thursday September 25, @11:14AM
Is it because there's more testing at younger ages, and more prone-to-false-positives-but-we'd-better-do-it-just-to-be-safe testing, and similar? In other words that it's always been there but never been much of a concern?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Wednesday September 24, @11:51AM (4 children)
Back in my younger years, I dated someone for a few years who had survived stage 4 cancer as a teenager. She still had the scars from the surgeries that were needed to save her life. Given that she was born and raised around mining (her hometown existed due to copper and iron mines in the area, and the men in her family had all been miners for at least a couple of generations), I'd guess the odds of some sort of environmental cause are fairly high.
Saving her life and her brain was way more important than saving her future biological children. In general, this focus on trying to "preserve bloodlines" and such is feudal nonsense that should have gone away a long time ago. If you want the experience of raising kids and can't have any of your own, there's no shortage of scared kids in bad situations in need of good caring adoptive or at least foster parents.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 24, @01:49PM (3 children)
> feudal nonsense
You say that, but increasingly more than 50% of the population disagrees.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Wednesday September 24, @03:42PM (1 child)
I would counter that given the decrease in birth rates, that a significant percentage of the population doesn't disagree enough about the importance of their personal genetic line to want to take on the time, expense, and responsibility of biological children.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 24, @08:56PM
It's got more to do with the fact that you don't need to have a dozen kids these days to have one or two that survive to adulthood, the lack of resources being allowed to be kept by workers so they can afford to have children and the general state of the economy being focused on allowing a handful of robber barons to run up high scores while burning everything to the ground.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 24, @07:43PM
Do they agree with that, or is it the result of a failure of the opposition to offer them something better and then make it clear why the good things are happening? It's a relatively small number of mostly rural hicks that take the view that socialism is worse than letting people of color and workers get benefits from working. And, as unpopular as Obamacare was in the South, the exchanges when branded to something else were a lot more popular. As much as people in Kentucky hated Obamacare, they seemed to love kynect, even though it was created as a part of Obamacare. It's just that the Democrats allowed the states to name their marketplaces to things that weren't clearly connected to the ACA. It made it a lot easier for the GOP to attack as the ACA was this federal thing that people didn't really get, but these exchanges, which the GOP was allowed to name to other things, were things that normal people could interact with more directly.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday September 24, @12:31PM (8 children)
Foods full of preservatives, artificial flavorings, artificial colors, fillers, high fructose corn syrup, and other artificial sweeteners need to be looked at. Livestock raised on antibiotic laced feeds, and hormones are suspect as well. Every bit of that crap goes down the gullet, gets processed, then sits in your bowels for hours before being evacuated. Your bowels weren't meant to hold a toxic dump, they were only meant to hold waste products from natural foods and natural digestion. That whole 'generally recognized as safe' misnomer needs to be re-examined. General Mills or Purina or whoever runs some minimal testing on some ingredient, find no problems, and use that ingredient in our foods, with no further testing by the FDA or anyone else.
We need to get back to foods with only a short list of ingredients. And, all those ingredients are readily recognized by young and old alike - like peanut butter contains peanuts, and salt. That's it. Nothing else is necessary, or desirable. Nothing.
We worry so much about sugar, but sugar is the least of our worries regarding ingredients in our foods. Think about Coca Cola - we go out of our way to find Coke manufactured in Mexico, because it is made with real sugar, and tastes soooo much better than US Coca Cola.
“Take me to the Brig. I want to see the “real Marines”. – Major General Chesty Puller, USMC
(Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 24, @01:51PM (1 child)
Why do you hate America, asshole?
It's Tylenol, duh.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 24, @06:21PM
Nothing bad can happen, it can only good happen
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday September 24, @01:59PM
Not answering my own post, am I?
This article disagrees with me about sugar in the diet https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/study-links-sugary-drinks-to-colorectal-cancer-spreading-elsewhere-in-the-body-5919058 [theepochtimes.com] Like TFA, it points out the increasing risk of cancer among younger adults, but it seems to directly blame sugars in the diet. It's worth reading, IMO.
“Take me to the Brig. I want to see the “real Marines”. – Major General Chesty Puller, USMC
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 24, @07:47PM
I think it's clear that there's a bunch of crap in the food supply that shouldn't be there, but it's kind of mind-boggling the priorities that RFK JR has been setting for what to address. I don't think that there'd be much complaint about things like addressing the excessive amounts of antibiotics in the livestock feed, or the excessive amount of corn products, sugar and artificial sweeteners in everything compared with things like the artificial colors that aren't really that big of a deal or things like vaccines that really aren't an issue at all. I looked up the paper from the day I was born, and they were projecting at that time that we'd have dealt with measles definitively by the early '80s, and meanwhile 45ish years later, measles is on a comeback due to ignorant people like RFK JR., that are spreading a bunch of conspiracy theories.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday September 24, @11:31PM (3 children)
Each of the things you list, taken individually, are probably mostly harmless for the vast majority of people.
When you throw lots of them at lots of people with lots of genetic and situational states, then people (animals, plants, archaea, protists, what have you) are straying very far from the environment they evolved in.
Change is challenge. Sometimes the results of challenge is good, more often it is unpleasant, painful, sometimes deadly, sometimes extinctifying.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday September 24, @11:40PM (2 children)
Bingo. And, you hit on one of the ideas regarding vaccinations. Individually, no vaccine has been conclusively demonstrated to cause autism. But, you take some little kids, and mandate all the vaxes we have now, you're opening the door to all sorts of potential interactions.
https://www.dshs.texas.gov/immunizations/school/requirements [texas.gov]
Too much of a good thing isn't all that good.
“Take me to the Brig. I want to see the “real Marines”. – Major General Chesty Puller, USMC
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday September 25, @03:04PM (1 child)
One of the strongest pieces of personal observation I have that says: mercury in vaccines probably didn't cause autism is this:
Back when our kids were born (2001-2003), they were in the process of removing mercury from US pediatric vaccines. Rates of diagnosed Autism were climbing, dramatically at the time. In the 20-25 years since mercury has been removed from US pediatric vaccines, autism rates have only continued to climb. Of course, there's the confounding factors of: more aggressive Dx, broadening of the criteria for a Dx, and fewer parents "in denial" refusing to allow their children to be diagnosed for various reasons.
One of the strongest pieces of personal observation I have that says: childhood vaccines may contribute to the severity of autism is this:
Our son born in 2001 had his full vaccination schedule, with mercury, up until about age 3. After he received the Hep-A vaccine and spiked a horrendously high and persistent fever later that evening (ER visit, ice packs, alternating Tylenol/Motrin treatment for days after kept it down to 105...) this, in the peak of the Andrew Wakefield plausibility cycle, mom drew her line in the sand: no more vaccines. Our son born in 2003 stopped vaccinations then and there as well, around 14 months of age. Our eldest is profound, non functional in society, too smart for his own good but also unable to communicate verbally beyond a very small vocabulary of simple requests for food, DVDs, ride in the car, etc. Our younger son is still highly challenged, not fully conversational but much better than his older brother. It's a single sibling study, would need 100x replication of the circumstances to begin to control for confounding factors. It's also in our faces, daily, for the last 20 years.
Dad drew his line in the sand: We all keep our Tetanus vaccines up to date, particularly when engaging in activities at risk - like running around on rocky beaches. Otherwise, we're still "vaccine-lite", and even 20 years ago that was just about as easy to do as going to the pediatrician to get the vaccines - just a one time visit to some county office to sign a blue piece of paper saying: "we choose not to." No questions asked, blue paper readily accepted in place of proofs of vaccination everywhere we go. They used to look completely bewildered when we asked for Tetanus vaccination while refusing the others, but that's getting a little better now. I will note that 15 years ago you could get the Tetanus vaccine for free or maybe some nominal / optional $10 per dose fee. Last time we got it the county health office price had increased to something like $70 per dose - right there is the strongest anti-vaccine measure I have seen through the years, legislated by the State - making vaccines a significant cost burden for a lot of the population - seemingly intentionally undermining herd immunity.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 26, @01:26AM
Maybe in most people that's not a problem, but when you have billions of people taking MRNA vaccines you might notice some getting cancer at higher rates than expected.
(Score: 2) by pdfernhout on Wednesday September 24, @01:10PM
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cdc-turbo-cancer/ [snopes.com]
"Because turbo cancer is not a clinically recognized condition, because the purported data suggesting a 14,000% increase in this not-real condition involves only a subset of individuals aged 30-39, and because the data from which that subset was derived is incapable of assessing causation for any condition, including fictional ones, we rate the claim as "False.""
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by https on Thursday September 25, @12:55AM
The elephant in the room is covid.
On top of all the acute-phase harms and long-term organ damage, covid is oncogenic - in that it at the very least suppresses the body's normal cancer-killer responses.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.04.12.589252v1 [biorxiv.org]
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10094438/ [nih.gov]
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9361571/ [nih.gov]
Covid never went away, and there are no sterilizing vaccines yet (crossing my fingers on the efforts out of Spain). Covid never went away, and there's no persistent immunity in anybody (herd immunity/hybrid immunity is fiction for SEIRS pathogens). Covid is still spreading, and most places have abandoned collective mitigation. To within rounding error, no individuals are engaged in mitigation efforts.
It's not mysterious unless your paycheque depends on it being mysterious.
Offended and laughing about it.