Accelerated Aging Could Be Contributing to Rise of Early-Onset Cancer Among Younger Adults, Study Reveals

Researchers have discovered that accelerated biological aging could be connected to why there has been a rise in cancer among younger adults.

Cancer is an Aging Disease

For several types of cancer, aging is a primary risk factor. This means that the likelihood of getting diagnosed increases when one gets older. Experts also recognize that, beyond being a number, age also sheds light on the body's wear and tear caused by different factors, such as genetics, stress, and lifestyle.

Though cancer is known to be an aging disease, rates have been increasing among young people. Dr. Yin Cao, the study's senior author and associate surgery professor at the School of Medicine at Washington University, explains that whether the biological aging concept could be applied to younger people remains unknown.

Accelerated Aging Could Be Contributing To Early-Onset Cancer

The team of Cao examined the medical records of 148,724 individuals aged 37 to 54 years. All of them were UK Biobank participants

The researchers homed into nine biomarkers that are correlated with biological age. These were creatinine, albumin, c-reactive protein, mean cell volume, glucose, white blood cell counts, lymphocyte percent, alkaline phosphatase, and red cell distribution width.

All these values were plugged into the PhenoAge algorithm, which the researchers used to calculate each person's biological age. The researchers then went on to determine accelerated aging by comparing the individuals' chronological ages with their biological ages.

The researchers then examined cancer registries to see the number of people within the group that had received early cancer diagnoses, which they defined as cancers that appeared before 55 years of age. There were almost 3,200 diagnosed early cancers.

They discovered that individuals who were born in 1965 or later were 17% more likely to exhibit accelerated aging than those who were born from 1950 to 1954.

Adjusting the data for factors that could confound findings, the researchers discovered that accelerated aging was linked to increased cancer risk. The strongest associations were observed in uterine, intestinal, stomach, and lung cancers.

In comparison to individuals with the lowest amount of fast aging in the sample from the biobank, those with the highest scores had twice the risk of developing early-onset lung cancer, over 60% higher likelihood of getting gastrointestinal tumor, and over 80% increased risk of developing uterine cancer.

Though the study was not meant to explain why such types of cancer had the most vital links with accelerated aging, graduate student Ruiyi Tian, the study's lead author, has some possible explanations.

According to Tian, the lungs may be more vulnerable to aging than other tissues due to their limited capacity for regeneration. Tian also explains that intestinal and stomach cancers have been associated with inflammation, which heightens with age.

Cao says the study's strength is that such signals were observed among a large number of people. However, Cao also acknowledges the study's limitations, including that the individuals were not followed over time and that the blood test results came from a single test.

Cao explains that the ideal situation would be to have several blood samples taken across the participant's life course. However, this is not feasible even in biobanks like the UK Biobank.

The association must be tested further among more diverse populations since social factors linked to racial discrimination must also be shed light on.

The study's findings were presented during the annual conference of the American Association of Cancer Research in San Diego.

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