While cancer is a disease that most commonly affects people over 50 years old, a joint U.S.-UK cancer funding review found that over the past 30 years, there has been a rise in cancer rates among people under 50 in multiple countries.
“From our data, we observed something called the birth cohort effect,” Dr. Shuji Ogino, a Harvard professor and physician-scientist in the Department of Pathology at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, said about the review published in Nature Reviews Clinical Oncology (pdf). “This effect shows that each successive group of people born at a later time—e.g., a decade later—have a higher risk of developing cancer later in life, likely due to risk factors they were exposed to at a young age.”
