Number of people under 50 diagnosed with colorectal cancer has been increasing for 30 years
Mohammed Elamin Aliwi/Alamy
One of the most alarming trends regarding cancer is the increasing incidence of several types of tumors in people under the age of 50, especially colorectal cancer.
A £20m, five-year research project aimed at discovering the causes of the rising number of bowel cancers has been given the green light. The study will use blood, urine and stool samples from millions of people held in about 17 biobanks in Europe, North America and India.
The goal is to determine whether this increase is related to changes in food, drink, medicines, air pollutants, and other environmental chemicals by measuring everything people are exposed to (known as the “exposome”). It’s about understanding what’s going on.
“Exposomes are all the elements of the outside world that influence our health,” he says. Andrew Chan co-leader of the project at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston;
The number of people under the age of 50 diagnosed with colorectal cancer has been increasing for 30 years. In the UK, for example, these tumors have increased by about 50 per cent in people aged 25 to 49 over this period, and similar trends are seen in the US, Canada, Australia and some European countries.
Nine out of 10 tumors occur in older people, so the increase in deaths among people under age 50 has not yet had a significant impact on the total number of cancer deaths. But this trend is worrying to doctors, especially since tumors in younger people tend to be more aggressive and diagnosed at a later stage.
Speculation abounds as to the cause, but various aspects of modern diets, including increased consumption of processed foods and red meat, and a lack of fiber, as well as antibiotic use and exposure to pollutants, are likely to be contributing factors. It is believed that this is the main cause.
In a new research projectChan and his team have attempted to identify and measure all the chemicals in medical samples obtained in previous studies, and plan to investigate further.
They will use mass spectrometry to identify the chemical signatures that disrupted the levels of novel compounds and natural biochemicals that entered the body.
One of the biobanks being used is Nurses’ Health Study 3, a large-scale project in the United States that charts the health and lifestyles of hundreds of thousands of nurses. Some participants have provided not only blood samples but also stool samples, which will allow the team to analyze gut bacteria as well.
Another important cohort is the Danish Newborn Screening Biobank. The biobank contains dried blood spots from almost every baby born in Denmark since 1982, representing approximately 2 million samples. This will allow researchers to see whether what we are exposed to in the womb is associated with an increased risk of colon cancer.
If, as expected, a correlation is found between certain biochemicals in the blood and the risk of colon cancer, the researchers will investigate whether blood tests can identify people who are more vulnerable. says Mr. Chan. “That could be a group of people who would be targeted for more intensive colon cancer testing,” he says.
Another part of the project will test whether reversing blood characteristics associated with colorectal cancer reduces people’s risk of developing the tumor. Jordana Bell Professor at King’s College London and one of Chan’s collaborators. “We seek to apply the insights we generate early by identifying putative causal factors, understanding potential mechanisms, and designing intervention trials,” she says.
Ian Fawkes from Cancer Research UK (CRUK) said: “In the United States, recent data show that people born in the 1990s have a 2.4 times higher risk of colon cancer than people born in the 1950s. Most cancer cases occur in people over age 50. “This development is an important issue for us to address. The key is to understand why the rise in early-onset cancers is occurring in the first place.”
CRUK is funding the research along with Maryland’s National Cancer Institute, France’s National Cancer Institute and the UK’s Gut Babe Foundation.
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Source: www.newscientist.com
