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Dramatic rise in cancer in people under 50
- fithisux 3y ago[flagged]
- jacknobody 3y agoQuackery? "Nature Reviews Clinical Oncology" isn't usually quackery is it? I think that a Journal of Medical Science, specialising in Oncology, might have something worthwhile to say.
- literalAardvark 3y agoWhich of those has insufficient evidence in your view?
- superchroma 3y agoCould it be the microplastics in our heart tissues? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37067554 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37067554
- LoveMortuus 3y ago>One limitation of this study is that researchers did not have an adequate amount of data from low- and middle-income countries to identify trends in cancer incidence over the decades. If they had this data, it could perhaps answer your question. But I would say that microplastics do play a negative role.
- superchroma 3y agoI admit that the question was ostensibly rhetorical in nature, they're doing no good being there that's for sure :(
- kome 3y agocellphones? imho our generation cigarettes. studies will point that radiation are not harmful until they are.
- jdiff 3y agoA hunch isn't science. Just because they're demonstrably harmful mentally doesn't mean they are physically.
- ilyt 3y agoYou sound like my grandma lmao. If it was cellphones it would be easy to spot as places where they are closest to (left/right hip, head) would be ones with increased cancer rates
- Turskarama 3y agoIf you actually look at how strong the radiation phones put out is, you'd realize there's basically no way. The power is at a maximum 3 watts, and is usually measured in milliwatts if you're somewhere with excellent reception. This is roughly on par with the amount of heat released while charging. Not fast charging mind you, charging with an old micro usb 5v charger. Compare this to a radio station which can transmit tens of kilowatts of power. If radio waves could cause cancer, people who work at radio stations would be riddled with it, and radio stations have been around a lot longer than phones.
- delhanty 3y agoYour analysis doesn’t account for the inverse square law. That is, wouldn’t we want to compare the radiant flux rather than the power?
- Turskarama 3y agoYou would yes, but I think you'll find that with with 4 orders of magnitude to play with the radio tower still comes out on top. Also how much time do you actually spend with the phone against your head on any given day? A few minutes maybe. Someone working at the radio station is there for 8 hours.
- Aachen 3y agoArticle doesn't quantify how much "dramatic" is. While I read the source (it's not in the abstract either), anyone wants to guess what percentage it is that they call dramatic? (Of course, more than zero is worth looking into, I'm just curious if the alarmism is warranted.) Edit: citing my comment below, the best info I could reasonably find on mobile (I'm now 35 minutes into answering the question that the stupid headline raised) is: > - it's about +5% as a very rough estimate of an overall average. > - The highest I see is typically in Korea, up to about 20%, but often (for different cancer types) also around 5% or even negative in one case. (Keep in mind that 20% more may be peanuts if the original chance was one in a million. Is thyroid cancer common?) > - USA average is more like 2% I'd guess, with maxima of like 5%. > - Sweden is negative as often as positive, maybe +1%? Large error bars, though. > Dramatic? You be the judge, but the original authors never used that word
- az226 3y agoNeither does the conclusion. Nor is there an easy to read chart that shows it.
- Aachen 3y agoYep. The conclusion just says "has increased", and that's unfortunately not followed by a "by X" or any other quantification. I skimmed the whole article by now and am reverting back to the 260 data points (10 counties × 13 cancers × 2 genders) shown on page 3 to do it myself. Currently I'm wondering how to consolidate into a single number (on mobile). Should I eyeball guesstimate the percentage for each country, look up their population, and do a weighted average or what would be a good way to do this? Ideally I'd also compute the lower and upper bounds with the 95% CI values... Hmm Edit: ah it refers to a supplementary table, not shown in the paper, for the original data. So I don't have to eyeball it. Downloading that. Let's see ... what did I expect. 4 pages filled from top to bottom with numbers in narrow table cells. Text is not copyable, maybe due to the mobile pdf reader idk. But I'm going to draw the line here Eyeballing that thing on page 3 of the article: - it's about +5% as a very rough estimate of an overall average. - The highest I see is typically in Korea, up to about 20%, but often (for different cancer types) also around 5% or even negative in one case. (Keep in mind that 20% more may be peanuts if the original chance was one in a million. Is thyroid cancer common?) - USA average is more like 2% I'd guess, with maxima of like 5%. - Sweden is negative as often as positive, maybe +1%? Large error bars, though. Dramatic? You be the judge, but the original authors never used that word
- poor_engineer 3y agoMaybe there are different causes in different zones. For example, ozone layer hole sure did increase the cases in South America. In North America, maybe the industrialization and bad diet.
- jcims 3y agoI doubt it’s related to this, but I do wonder if we’ve passed peak robustness in the human genome with modern medicine and technology insulating it from the crucible of natural selection.
- orangepurple 3y agoThere is plenty of natural selection going on. A large amount of people will not have kids this decade due to anti-natalist propaganda and wars (Chiraq, Ukraine, Africa, etc.). Each time someone does not have a child, there is a future fractal effect of their decision which does not occur. Namely their kids won't have kids, etc., for all possible future generations. So in essence each couple that has more than two kids on average moving forward through the future has a massive impact on the future population. Also there are huge changes to the global genome composition as a result of mixed race breeding. It was much more rare before 1980. So nobody can claim that peak robustness has been reached unless you can specify some testable metric for it.
- avgcorrection 3y agoWhat anti-natalist propaganda?
- myle 3y agoDo you live in Western society? There is a prevelant point of view that it is wiser to have children later, because otherwise it hurts your career. I am not saying this is wrong. It does, though, decrease the number of kids we have.
- avgcorrection 3y agoThat's not anti-natalism.
- thfuran 3y agoIt also doesn't sound like propaganda.
- gbin 3y ago"dramatic rise" cool... By how much? Am I the only one tired of super dramatized articles with no facts or data at all?
- tacker2000 3y agoIt’s sad that even an institution like Harvard is succumbing to this kind of sensationalism…
- tjpnz 3y agoIs this meant to be satirical?
- tacker2000 3y agoNo, not really. Are they usually posting stuff like this?
- Retric 3y agoBetween 0% and some number… >They couldn’t precisely measure what proportion of this growing prevalence could solely be attributed to screening and early detection. However, they noted that increased incidence of many of the 14 cancer types is unlikely due to enhanced screening alone.
- layer8 3y agoPage 3 of the linked study [0] shows annual average percentage changes. Not sure how “dramatic” those are. [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41571-022-00672-8.epdf https://www.nature.com/articles/s41571-022-00672-8.epdf
- LoveMortuus 3y ago>They couldn’t precisely measure what proportion of this growing prevalence could solely be attributed to screening and early detection. However, they noted that increased incidence of many of the 14 cancer types is unlikely due to enhanced screening alone. I hope the majority of the increase is due to enhanced screening. Anything that gives us more time to solve the cancer problem!
- CPLX 3y agoI'm basing this on absolutely no specialized knowledge or research of my own, but it has to be processed food. Like it just has to be, in about 2-3 generations we've just utterly abandoned tens of thousands of years of fairly consistently eating variations on plants, cooked animal flesh, and fermented variations of the same, in favor of a staggering array of highly pre-processed chemicals. The results are obvious and instantly visible everywhere: massive increases in obesity, chronic conditions like fatigue and depression, and so on. We're poisoning ourselves. The only other contender that comes to mind is being constantly surrounded by and consuming plastic. Which is basically another thread on the same basic issue of our industrialized diets. Hey maybe I'm wrong. But probably not right?
- avgcorrection 3y agoThrow a dart at a barn and you'll hit something that we're doing which we didn't really do until 150 years ago. But processed food is a likely culprit.
- stuaxo 3y agoThere are a lot of PFAS chemicals and Microplastics just about everywhere and this is just a start.
- refurb 3y agoWhat is the link to cancer?
- red-iron-pine 3y agoAye. there are certainly reasons to think that PFAS is a bad thing and having an impact, but given how insanely widespread it is, what is the real impact?
- cies 3y agoThe mass rollout of mRNA treatment was not mentioned in this article. I wonder if they tried to control for "sleep deprivation, increase in alcohol consumption" to find out if that's correlating. I'd be even more interested to see what happens if they control for mRNA treatment status.
- dillydogg 3y agoI'm not familiar with any use of mRNA based treatments before 2012, are you?
- photonerd 3y agoDramatic rise in cancer diagnosis.
- Aachen 3y agoHow many people die without the cause of death known?
- throwaway290 3y agoFor all 14 cancers in question? Likely more in 2000 than in 2012. Don't know by how much and not saying they didn't control for that, just answering your question...
- photonerd 3y agoA quite large number! Not to mention those who died if other causes but hadn’t had a cancer diagnosis yet. But we’re talking about cancer incidence not deaths. Which—like the “rise” is autism—is quite likely due to early detection & patient awareness than external factors.
- pachico 3y agoCouldn't the reason be also that people survive or simply don't get affected by other illnesses anymore?
- Aachen 3y agoCould that be the cause for the numbers, if the numbers are only about people under the age of 50? Also in 1900, afaik it was very normal to live till 50.
- 7moritz7 3y agoYeah, maybe don't allow shit like aspartame or TiO2 (read banning of it in Northern Ireland after it has been happily used in food) to go into production before establishing more concrete evidence for its safety then. Same goes for parabens in cosmetics (read banning of specific parabens in the EU), you can't act surprised that some turn out to have an agonistic effect like estrogen and be potentially carcinogenic in women and accumulate in vitro when you throw it at the market with little real safety data. The biggest joke I've read is a recent-ish review concluding that consumers can cross the maximum recommended daily exposure with just a few cosmetics containing specific parabens because it was underestimated how much consumers use.
- cubefox 3y agoThere are various reasons to believe Aspartame is pretty safe: https://dynomight.substack.com/p/aspartame-brouhaha https://dynomight.substack.com/p/aspartame-brouhaha
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jdietrich 3y agoWe know that obesity and sedentary lifestyles have become vastly more common and significantly increase the risk of many cancers. We know that diagnosis rates have greatly increased because of widespread population screening, more sensitive diagnostic tests and improved access to healthcare. It shouldn't particularly surprise us that there has been a small but steady increase in the rate of diagnosed cancers in recent decades. We should be very cautious about immediately jumping to the conclusion that something we don't like (plastics, mobile phones, vaccines) is probably terribly carcinogenic despite the lack of causal evidence.
- lonelyasacloud 3y ago>> We should be very cautious about immediately jumping to the conclusion that something we don't like (plastics, mobile phones, vaccines) is probably terribly carcinogenic despite the lack of causal evidence. Think it depends If exposure is based on good evidence that it is safe, and/or personal choice is involved, then absolutely, e.g. Vaccines, RF. However, when humans are being exposed to an environment outside that to which we are adapted to (usually because the market has been largely left to get on with it), e.g. plastics exposure, continuous traffic and aircraft noise, pollution, sugar loaded convenience foods, fast food rich environments, places that prioritise vehicle movement over humans etc. Then in those cases its worth noting that historically they are good health outcomes, e.g. smoking, leaded petrol, alcohol, hydrogenated vegetable fat, DDT etc. In general there aren't that many animals that thrive in the long-term outside of their evolutionary niches. And personally as an Engineer I don't think waiting for the scientific process to fight its way through the vested interests to start doing something about things that are very likely problems is a sensible approach.
- Findecanor 3y agoIncluded in life-style factors is also that people are eating more meat than ever before. While meat itself isn't unhealthy, some ways of cooking and curing meat do introduce well-known cancer risks. Some common plastics are also known cancer risks — if you heat them up or dissolve them, and inhale the fumes. Personally, I believe my hobby with synthetic resins and styrene (using solvent-based "glue") is what could have caused the B-cell lymphoma that I am suffering from. I say "cancer risks" because it is not either/or: It is about probabilities. Cancer mutations actually happen often in the body, and the immune system is constantly fighting them. It is when the immune system loses that you "get cancer".
- Borrible 3y agoShould I be reincarnated, I try to be born in a country with a high death rate from cancer. Coincidentally, they correlate with the countries that have a high life expectancy. But beware, the average cancer mortality there has been decreasing for decades. If you're unlucky, you might just die of old age...
- pirate787 3y agoThis study specifically is about people under the age of 50
- risyachka 3y agoPeople sit 12+ hours per day (work, commute, at home) and eat processed foods. Living literally the opposite lifestyle from the one our bodies are made for. Not a surprise.
- Aachen 3y agoOur bodies were made for Africa afaik, and for outrunning prey across long distances using the revolutionary sweating method, and for having children at 14 years old. Anyone who isn't doing this can be argued to be unnatural. I find this argument always very weird, especially on hacker news. Just because something wasn't made for X, doesn't that mean you can't or shouldn't use it for X? That's basically the definition of hacking in the hacker news sense of the word. By this logic, we shouldn't be taking any mode of transportation because we didn't evolve to sail, drive, or fly. Heck, we shouldn't be writing on the Internet, let alone writing at all! Wouldn't it make more sense to argue the point itself, e.g. our bodies don't deal well with X because of Y, rather than citing historic evolutionary pressures?
- ifyoubuildit 3y ago> I find this argument always very weird, especially on hacker news. Just because something wasn't made for X, doesn't that mean you can't or shouldn't use it for X? That's basically the definition of hacking in the hacker news sense of the word. Just because you can use your impact driver as a hammer doesn't mean its going to last if you use it like one. It doesn't seem contradictory to acknowledge that you can do all sorts of things, but some of those things are going to have varying levels of consequences. There is a sense of optimism that I see in people that everything new is good. I had that same optimism for a long time. But so did people who were using leaded gas and xrays for fitting shoes. Now I reflexively don't trust anything that doesn't have a long history of successful usage.
- frank_bb 3y ago[dead]
- thenerdhead 3y agoDramatic rise in cancer, dramatic rise in CVD, dramatic rise in infertility, dramatic rise in what next? There’s more things killing you slowly. Look to stress as a major driver of these things as well. (I.e. Sapolsky’s work)
- dzink 3y ago1. How dramatic? 2. Which cancers? 3. Could it be explained with decrease in other diseases, which leaves cancer as last illness. 4. Could it be explained with better diagnosis methods - are the cancers benign or malignant. Slow or fast growing?
- ekianjo 3y agoWhy is there never any chart in this kind of articles?