here’s who gets hit and why

Until a few decades ago the cancer it was considered a disease linked to aging, since it required more time to develop and more genomic and genetic mutations to accumulate in order to proliferate malignant cells and tumor mass. Today, however, we are witnessing all over the world a dramatic increase of neoplasms in the under 50sas evidenced by a study by Brigham and Women’s Hospital (the second largest hospital after Harvard Medical School) published in Nature Reviews Clinical Oncology, which underlines the alarm of early onset breast cancer, colon, esophagus, kidneys, liver, pancreashead and neck, prostate, stomach, thyroid, gallbladder and bone marrow, in people who have not yet turned 50, a trend dubbed the “birth cohort effect”, meaning the risk of developing cancer increases with each generation compared to the previous, the same risk that will continue to rise in subsequent generations.

The researchers have highlighted that the higher incidence in some types of cancer is certainly due to early diagnosis through screening programmes, but this cannot be the only and main reason for the increase in tumors among young adults compared to those starting in the old age. Of the 14 types of cancer considered in the aforementioned study, 8 are those related to the digestive system, an element that has shifted attention to the intestinal microbiota, or rather to modern diets that directly influence its composition, interacting with the susceptibility of the genomes and genetic ones, and influencing, together with changes in lifestyle, the onset and outcome of the disease. Scientific evidence has suggested that one of the main causes could be the explosion of risk factors in early childhood and adolescence, associated with later alcohol consumption, smoking, obesity and the intake of certain foods, but also to the much less time spent sleeping at night, as children sleep much less than they did decades ago.

Thus excluding that the higher incidence of early-onset cancers is connected to the increase in diagnoses during preventive examinations, international scientists are crossing data from many countries to verify the trends in cancer incidence in this decade and in future ones, monitoring them globally, also because the tumors of people under 50 are often more aggressive than in the elderly, and in Italy it is estimated that one in three Italians will fall ill with cancer in their lifetime. In 2022, over 400,000 new cases of malignant tumors were registered in our country over 90% of new cases concerned citizens over 50, but that 10% of people who have not yet reached middle age reveals an ascent curve and a peak that shows no signs of stopping, since it is ascertained that people who will be born in the next decade have a greater risk of falling ill in young age. The cohort study therefore aims to collect health data as proven, to recover permanently.