It is a script that is repeated more or less similarly in all the oncology departments of Italian hospitals, with an exponential increase in cancer cases among young people, in particular with regard to colon cancer, once considered exclusive – except for a few very rare cases – of people over 50: an alarm that is starting to arouse considerable concern among doctors and researchers, collected by Repubblica and which starts from a given certainly alarming. In fact, from a 2023 study published in the journal Bmj Oncology, it emerges that cases of cancer – not specifically of the colon – among young people understood as under 50 increased between 1990 and 2019 79,1% with a further and even more worrying 27.7% increase in deaths.
“Cancers among young people are on the increase”, explains Alberto Bardelli (professor of oncology at the University of Turin and director of the Milanese research center Ifom-Ets) to Repubblica who together with his team decided to investigate the causes. The hypothesis is that the increase in colon cancer cases could be linked to some known factors, such as “gli sugars complexes of carbonated drinks” or “the Red meat cooked at high temperatures” and “alcohol“; but also to ‘new’ factors such as “the effect of microplastics that we ingest unconsciously.”
The alleged effect of microplastics on colon cancer: “Our body doesn’t know how to expel them”
Focusing on cases of colon cancer, however, the researcher says he is particularly amazed and concerned by the fact that the children who arrive at the hospital already have one or more metastases throughout the body, while the medical literature believes that it takes “between 5 and 10 years to grow” to the point of metastasizing. In this sense, there could be two hypotheses: the first is that children “started developing colon cancer at 14 years old”, while the second is that it is “a different tumor, capable of growing faster“.
From all these hypotheses we arrived at a clinical test, which started by taking some tumor cells from younger patients, then cultivating them in the laboratory and subjecting them to the stresses that Bardelli spoke about: “In the case of plastics and red meats we see an increase in cell proliferation“, which does not necessarily correspond to a direct effect on the development of colon cancer, but rather to the possible effect on proliferation up to metastasis. But if on the one hand the effect of red meat is knownon the other hand, microplastics are almost unknown, especially “to the organism [che] he doesn’t know how to behave and has no mechanism to get rid of it.”
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