Scientists have been struggling to understand why more people who are less than 55 years of age are being diagnosed with cancer. These cases are described as early-onset cancer because cancers typically tend to develop in people above 55, but this is changing and researchers want to know why.
It was “understandable” when people were diagnosed with cancer at 55 years or beyond because as the body gets older, it accumulates damage at the cellular level to the extent that tumor development begins.
Now that younger people are developing cancer, the scientific community is racing to find out why, even though definitive causes of cancers haven’t been pinpointed. Only risk factors have so far been identified for various cancers.
A team at Washington University Medicine set out to investigate whether the rate at which a person’s body ages can help to explain their predisposition to early-onset cancer.
For their study, they analyzed data on 154,000 individuals tracked by the UK Biobank. All of them were young adults. Another 10,000 people whose data was available through a U.S. NIH (National Institutes of Health) research program were also examined in the study.
The research team focused on examining how chronological aging and biological aging trends have been changing over subsequent generations. Chronological age refers to the number of years an individual has been alive (how old one is), while biological age refers to how quickly one has been aging on the inside. For example, if someone is 20 years old, is their metabolism functioning at the level of a 20-year-old or is it functioning like that of someone much older?
The ideal is to have chronological age match biological age, but this rarely happens due to genetic, environmental, dietary and other factors.
To assess biological age, the study team analyzed different biomarkers that provide information on how effectively different body organs and systems are functioning. For example, they looked at albumin, a biochemical marker made by the liver, to gauge how well the liver is working.
These biomarkers were then compared to a scale that categorizes biological age so that one can tell whether their system is working at the level it is expected to perform at that chronological age or it is exhibiting signs of being much older.
The researchers found that older generations tended to have a lower variation between their chronological and biological age while recent generations have wider variance. For instance, the cohort born in the years 1965 to 1974 had a smaller variation between chronological and biological age while those born in the years 1990-1999 tended to be a lot older biologically when compared to their chronological age.
The differences didn’t stop there. The data revealed a higher likelihood of early-onset cancer in people with the biggest difference between their biological and chronological ages. People with a smaller deviation between chronological and biological age had fewer cases of early-onset cancer.
The researchers plan to conduct additional studies to shed more light on what exactly is triggering the growing deviation between chronological and biological age with each successive generation. These insights could help at-risk people to get screened for various cancers sooner and preventive interventions or even treatment can be started earlier.
As efforts to understand why cancer cases are rising among younger adults continue, different companies like CNS Pharmaceuticals Inc. (NASDAQ: CNSP) are also working to bring more medications onto the market to address the needs of those diagnosed with cancer.
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