When we think of patients with colon cancerour mind can automatically go to a middle-aged person with different risk factors behind them. However, epidemiology is documenting a radical change in statisticssince more and more young people are being diagnosed with this type of cancer, which makes us reflect to look for the ‘why’.
The experts. Winette van der Graaf, professor of Medical Oncology at the Netherlands Cancer Institute (NKI), points to this new reality and states that “I would never have imagined that I would be seeing patients with colorectal cancer at the age of 19” as collect The Country. With this phrase he gives voice to a global trend that epidemiological studies continue to confirm, since cancer is no longer a disease almost exclusively of old age, and the incidence is growing at a rate four times faster in young people than in older people.
An explosion. Data supports the medical concern through multiple international macro studies, such as the one published in 2024 in The Lancet. Here, 50 countries were analyzed and showed that early-onset colorectal cancer (between 25 and 49 years) is increasing in 27 of them. But the most revealing data is in 20 of those 27 territories, where the increase in cases is exclusive to young people or is advancing much faster than in the adult population.
The fastest pace is taken by countries such as New Zealand or Chile, growing at 4.0% annually, and Puerto Rico with 3.8%. Furthermore, in 14 countries, including Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom, cases are increasing in young people while remaining stable in those over 50 years of age.
Among the youngest. The figures here are scary, since, according to the data From the CDC, data on colorectal cancer among adolescents tripled between 1999 and 2020. If we go into detail, in the 20 to 24 year old group they grew by 185%, while in the 10 to 14 year old age group the growth was 500% as the incidence went from 0.1 to 0.6 cases per 100,000 children.
The Spanish case. Here, a study based on real data from the Virgen de la Victoria Hospital published in JCO Global Oncology in 2024 analyzed more than 24,500 patients and found that 22.2% had early-onset cancer, being present before the age of 50. And we can go further, by making a list of the types of cancer that have increased the most in our territory:
- Sarcoma: increased by 43.4% in young people compared to 28.6% in older people.
- Kidney: rose 27.8% in young people compared to 20.1% in older people.
- Testicle: grew by 16.3% in young people, while its incidence fell by 13.1% in older people.
Because? Here experts point to a combination of very diverse factors that try to explain it, although none of them is definitive. One of these is an inadequate diet with an increase in the consumption of red meat and calcium-deficient diets that is complemented by a tendency toward a sedentary lifestyle.
But in addition, the excessive use of antibiotics could be severely altering our intestinal microbiota, added to the impact of bacterial infections during childhood. And it even goes further by considering the role of the exposure we have since childhood to chemical elements such as pesticides or pollution in general to give it an explanation.
Images | brgfx on Magnific Julia Koblitz
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