Hasnain says:

“But what concerns us is what we’re seeing in the clinic every day: More young people, otherwise healthy with no genetic syndrome, being diagnosed with very advanced stages of gastrointestinal cancers. For men under 50, colorectal cancer is now the leading cause of cancer-related death, surpassing central nervous system tumors as well as lung cancers. In women under 50, it is now the second leading cause of cancer death. These are concerning numbers and we are all working hard to understand why this is happening.

What’s your sense of possible culprits?

We see this generational change — a “birth cohort effect” — in the rise of young-onset cancers. That leads us to suspect that a recent change in an environmental exposure or a combination of exposures is contributing to the rise. The main hypothesis is that some not-as-yet-identified environmental exposure is affecting individuals, starting in early life. The exposure perhaps occurs in utero, in infancy, or during childhood. That then predisposes us to cancers at an earlier age. A lot of work has been focused on what the environmental exposures may be and what they might be doing biologically to lead to cancer development at a younger age.”

Posted on 2024-02-13T03:19:40+0000