Cancer cases are on the rise among people under 50 — and researchers aren’t sure why. A recent study by the American Cancer Society found that 17 out of 34 cancer types were increasing among younger people.
At the Milken Institute’s Future of Health Summit on Thursday, researchers and health care executives talked about efforts to detect cancers earlier, save lives, and get to the root of why cancers have begun to rise in this population.
“The big question is always why,” said Kimryn Rathmell, director of the National Cancer Institute. “We need to understand the variation so that we can begin to understand which parts are related to obesity, diet and exercise; which ones are more related to sun exposure, smoking, alcohol — the risk factors that are well-known to us, but may have a variation in how they’re being consumed or exposed in younger people today.”
Some of the reason for the uptick in cancer cases among younger people, panelists agreed, comes down to expanded screening. The United States Preventative Services Task force recently recommended that women begin getting screened for breast cancer at age 40, rather than age 50, and recommended in 2020 that colon cancer screenings begin at age 45 instead of 50.
But despite these recommendations, screening procedures like colonoscopies and mammograms are still “vastly underutilized,” Harlan Levine, president of health innovation and policy at the City of Hope. That’s because of factors including cost and access, but also because even when younger people do start regular cancer screenings at earlier ages, they may not keep them up in the long term.
Since cancer is still rare among younger adults, people are likely to get negative test results. That “runs the risk of people, by the time they get older, kind of shrugging their shoulders and saying, ‘Well, I’ve been doing this for 10 years, why should I keep doing it?’” said Levine.
Part of the solution, the group agreed, is to develop more efficient, targeted tests that can detect cancers earlier on. Mohit Manrao, the head of U.S. oncology at AstraZeneca, noted that the company has recently developed an AI tool that can use biomarkers from common hospital tests to predict the likelihood that a person will get a disease, including some cancers, before a doctor would be able to make a diagnosis.
It’s also important to expand outreach to populations that haven’t had access to it in the past. Black women, for example, have a lower incidence of breast cancer than white women but 40% higher chance of dying from it.
If clinicians “go into areas where we find those Black women and do culturally-based screening to bring them along with the patient navigators and ambassadors whom they trust at community level, it could do wonders in terms of transforming outcomes for these younger women who today don’t have access to screening,” Manrao said.
It’s also important to educate younger populations about both the potential that they might get cancer earlier than they’d expect, he said, and the rapidly improving research on testing and treatments for them.
“We need to break the stigma of cancer, because right now, what was science fiction is becoming science reality in a clinic next door.”
