One clear trend emerged in their review: that dramatic changes in lifestyle have coincided with steep spikes in cancer cases among adults under 50.

Then, they reviewed previous studies of cancer risk factors to assess what factors might be contributing to surging cancer rates in younger and middle-aged adults. “For instance, people born in 1960 experienced higher cancer risk before they turn 50 than people born in 1950, and we predict that this risk level will continue to climb in successive generations.”įor the study, researchers first examined data on the global incidence of 14 different cancer types that became more common among adults under 50 between 20. This risk is increasing with each generation, Dr. This effect shows that each successive group of people born at a later time - for example, a decade-later - have a higher risk of developing cancer later in life, likely due to risk factors they were exposed to at a young age,” senior study author Shuji Ogino, MD, PhD, a professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, said in a statement. “From our data, we observed something called the birth cohort effect.

The incidence of several early-onset cancers, including tumors of the breast, colon, esophagus, kidney, liver, and pancreas, has dramatically increased around the world since 1990, researchers report in Nature Reviews Clinical Oncology. Globally, the number of cancer cases diagnosed in adults under 50 has surged in recent decades, and a new study suggests that diagnosis rates are climbing too much to be entirely explained by better screening or earlier detection.

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