Blame Obesity For Rising Cancer in Kids, Medics Say

Certain cancers are showing up more often in younger adults. Researchers believe obesity is to blame.

A comprehensive study published this week found that 6 out of 12 types of cancer thought to result from being significantly overweight are becoming notably more common among those under the age of 50.

What’s more, the younger the patient, the more common certain cancers were.

The findings, published in The Lancet Public Health, noted a significant increase in the incidence of multiple myeloma — a rare cancer that attacks the bone marrow — along with colorectal, uterine, gallbladder, kidney, and pancreatic cancer.

Obesity has also been linked to cancer of the stomach, liver, breasts, ovaries, esophagus, and thyroid.

The study’s authors said their work is the first since the mid-1990s to review trends in the incidence of these 12 obesity-related cancers. They compared them with 18 other cancers among younger adults.

 

Cancer Statistics

The team reviewed 20 years of data on those cancers, studying information from state registries on patients ranging in age from 25 to 84.

They found more than 14 million cases diagnosed from 1995 through 2014 for the 30 types of cancer.

By contrast, rates either dropped or held steady in all­­ but 2 of the 18 cancers not related to obesity.

The study’s authors found the incidence of that disease changed .77 percent per year on average in the 45- to 49-year age group.

By contrast, the annual incidence rose by 2.47 percent on average among 30- to 34-year-olds. In the 25- to 29-year-old cohort, the average yearly change was 4.34 percent.

Although adults ages 50 and older also experienced steady increases in the incidence of most of those obesity-related cancers — colorectal and uterine were the exceptions — the magnitude of those changes was smaller than among younger age groups, except for thyroid cancer.

What’s the connection?
The connection between obesity and certain cancers remains unclear, as does the reason for the uptick of those illnesses in ever-younger populations.

However, medical experts have some theories.

Experiments on mice have shown that obesity accelerates the uncontrolled growth of cells, which could result in human malignancies being discovered earlier in life, the recent study reported.

Obesity has been an increasingly worrisome problem for decades now.

 

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