Cancer growing among the young

 Time -  Researchers have found that young people around the world are getting many different kinds of cancer at alarmingly high rates... Why is cancer, historically a disease of old age, increasingly striking people in the primes of their lives?

Globally, diagnoses and deaths related to early-onset cancers—those affecting patients younger than 50—rose by 79% and 28%, respectively, from 1990 to 2019, according to a recent study published in the medical journal BMJ Oncology. In the U.S., breast cancer is the most common type of early-onset disease, but recent surges in cancers affecting digestive organs—including the colon, rectum, pancreas, and stomach—are particularly dramatic within this age group. In fact, today’s young adults are about twice as likely to be diagnosed with colon cancer—and four times as likely to be diagnosed with rectal cancer—as those born around 1950, research suggests.

Overall, cancer is still overwhelmingly an older person’s disease. As of 2025, 88% of people in the U.S. diagnosed with cancer were 50 or older, and 59% were 65 or older, according to data from the American Cancer Society. But there is no question that the demographics are shifting. Under 50s are not only at increasing risk of suffering from cancer; theirs is the only age group for which the risk is rising. All told, 17 types of cancer are on the rise among U.S. adults in this age group....

 There is some good news in the data. Advances in disease detection and treatment, as well as dramatic declines in smoking, mean that far fewer people die from cancer now than once did. Although the disease still ranks as the second most common cause of death in the U.S., killing more than half a million people each year, mortality rates have dropped by about a third since 1991.