8 ms·
Rising rates of cancer in young people prompts hunt for environmental culprit
- dredmorbius 2y agoArchive / paywall: <https://archive.is/vn8kR https://archive.is/vn8kR>
- andrewstuart 2y agoMaybe plastics.
- fransje26 2y agoA few probable culprits: - plastics / microplastics - processed food / ultra processed food - processing / conserving chemicals - pesticides - GMOs - And last, but certainly not least, a combination of all the above, at concentrations well below any "proven" toxicity level
- qbxk 2y agoJack Nicholson's Joker tried to warn us
- zenapollo 2y agoYep. The food, soil, and water systems are now and probably forever more riddled with plastics, heavy metals, and industrial agro chemicals. Plastic pollution (being a massive diversity of different petrochemicals) are probably the largest growing issue that would explain the US increase. However, there is one more culprit that is have recently been getting educated on. Blue light pollution. I’ve been learning how the more we disrupt our circadian rhythm with screens and artificial light, especially at night, we massively disrupt our natural hormone cycles (master hormone leptin for example). This makes it impossible for adults past a certain age to lose any weight (regardless of diet and exercise), exacerbating the already growing obesity problem.
- bhaney 2y agoThe article mentions microplastics as a potential cause that's being looked into, and that seems pretty reasonable, but are there any other suspicious potential causes?
- throw9474 2y agoBrainstorm: Artificial sugars, chemicals in so many products from Amazon, hormones in meat, vegan substitutes, new preservatives, new herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers Empirical observation: the two young people I know who had cancer (one died, other survived) frequented marijuana and had high levels of radon detected in their homes. But that doesn't necessarily support younger cancer trends.
- arnejenssen 2y agoAdding ultra processed "foods" to the brainstorm. It may contribute to reduced gut-health and affect the immune system.
- RandomThoughts3 2y agoThe name is new but "ultra processed" - which is to say processed - has been with us for 50 years nowadays. Deleterious effects are known: obesity, diabetes and, yes, uptake in cancers. Still, an unlikely candidate for a recent uptake in cancers amongst the young at least as a general category and not aiming at a specific new class of additives.
- _heimdall 2y agoIts hard to make assumptions like this though. There is always the possibility that prolonged exposure to processed foods impacts reproduction over time. We could be seeing a delayed spike now because parents were exposed to the food for a decade or two before they had children. This is all hypothetical, I'm not claiming this is the case. Its just worth considering delayed responses that require a generation or two before the symptoms are easy to spot.
- 2y ago
- vasco 2y agoSome of them we know why, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC452549/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC452549/ These are millions of people who are at elevated risk of soft tissue cancer because drug companies decided it'd be better to give contaminated medicines known to cause cancer later to developing countries populations. It's only one source but I recently became aware of this paper and it's a bit revolting.
- _heimdall 2y agoThat seems important, though unrelated here as the OP study only looked at cancer data in the US.
- vasco 2y agoIt might look like so at first glance but if you read the paper you will see the reason it was known that the US was exporting carcinogenic medicines is that before they knew, they were using it on americans. Millions of americans received the same medicines, then when they found out they were carcinogenic, instead of destroying those medicines the US gave them to developing countries to not let the stock go to waste.
- _heimdall 2y agoInteresting, yeah I missed that connection when skimming the paper. In this context its still important that the meds were given to Americans rather than developing countries, but that may be splitting hairs.
- consteval 2y agoInterestingly, this is exactly what Bayer pharmaceutical did with hemophilia medication during the AIDS crisis. They figured out their drug was contaminated with HIV so they stopped selling it to Americans. Instead, they sold it to developing countries.
- ziggyzecat 2y agounhealthy stress & subsequent lack of recovery due to continued screen exposure & fractal horseshit content while drinking these bum-piss energy drinks & sweets. and yeah, sure, "plastics". but its mostly the horseshit content & lack of something to "balance it off". it's just how the brain works & how it uses the body to signal that your lifestyle & environment are fucked up, with exceptions extending the rule, of course. the range of signals is broad and cancer is just one of the extremes, with the rest being written off as xyz, psychosomatic, the kid needs to go outside more, etc
- pistoleer 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- andy_ppp 2y ago[flagged]
- bamboozled 2y agoI have to wonder what the inactivity is doing to people, I know people who literally do next to nothing, going to the gym for 20 minutes a day is something, but it's nothing if you just go sit on the couch for the other 16 waking hours of the day.
- dehrmann 2y ago> Bafflingly, many of the new clinic’s young patients are in good shape, exercise regularly and eat healthily. That is prompting a hunt for environmental carcinogens capable of affecting entire generations
- jb1991 2y agoThe article specifically addresses the points you’ve made and does not believe them to be the culprit.
- andy_ppp 2y agoNo, it actually says these don’t account for all of the increase.
- ziggyzecat 2y agothanks for raising my attention to this detail
- ziggyzecat 2y agoyes, my bad for not reading the article properly ... classic case of wannabe-indie-thinker-judging-decades-long-training-based-on-universe-consciousness (i'm kidding but it's warranted, slightly exaggerated self-criticism)
- inglor_cz 2y agoWere you unable to access the text of the article because of some paywall or barrier? Or are you reacting to the title alone? The authors state very clearly that many of the victims lead a healthy life with enough movement and good food. Why would be a 2x - 3x increase of cancers in young people unbelievable? The baseline was very low, so a two- or three-fold increase still amounts to a relatively small amount of extra cancer cases that you don't have to notice in your personal acquaintance bubble. The vast majority of cancer still happens in the elderly.
- ionwake 2y agoUnable to read article - what is a way to view this without a subscription?
- ZeroGravitas 2y agoI'm guessing, since they don't state it clearly, that the combined rate of all cancers is falling, it's only when you look at subsets that it's rising. Which prompts the idea: "do different cancers compete for shared resources?" Would a lung cancer use up something that would prevent a different kind of cancer and so once smoking goes out of fashion you get some rebound as other cancers step into the gap left by them? edit: I looked at the paper and then followed the link to the paper they cite for a general increase in incidence in top cancers combined in Gen X by the time they reach 60. > Some portion of these increases can be attributed to rising obesity rates19 and increasingly sedentary lifestyles. 20-23 Another portion might be explained by changes in cancer registry policies and International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, 10th Revision (World Health Organization) classifications, 24 leading to inclusion of relatively indolent lesions in more recent periods that might not have been diagnosed as cancer in earlier periods. Furthermore, radiologic diagnoses have become more common following widespread deployment of sophisticated medical imaging technologies, 25 especially for thyroid 26,27 and kidney 28,29 cancers. We chose not to exclude any leading cancer site from our summaries because our granular estimates are freely available (eFigures 15-17 in Supplement 1). https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=5120010090140041393&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=51200100901400413...
- HPsquared 2y agoI wonder if the immune system plays a role. In one environment there is some stressor (e.g. smoking) which raises for example lung cancer risk, but also turns up some built-in anti-cancer systems in the body - the action of which which would prevent cancers in other areas. Compare to a person in a better environment where the immune system isn't as much in "cancer-prevention mode".
- bamboozled 2y agoI wonder if the immune system plays a role. It's well established the immune system plays a role in cancer.
- 2y ago
- CodeWriter23 2y ago[flagged]
- threeseed 2y agoIf that were the case you would see rising rates of cancer across all cohorts.
- worksonmine 2y agoWhat makes you say that? Wasn't myocarditis mostly a problem for young men for example? Narcolepsy from the H1N1 vaccine was similar, you needed very specific genetics to get it. The body is complex.
- bamboozled 2y ago"The body is complex" Yet here you are on hacker news pretending that you understand it without giving any evidence to backup your assumptions.
- worksonmine 2y agoThey are not assumptions and I'm not here to publish a paper. I'm asking for clarification on a statement. Are you also trying to tell me genetics, lifestyle and basically any difference we humans have can't affect side-effects? What data do you have for that ridiculous claim?
- _heimdall 2y agoYou raise this as if there isn't a plethora of evidence pointing to an increased risk of myocarditis in men under 40 receiving at least one Covid vaccine. There's plant of confusing data out there on both sides of the Covid debate, but this isn't one of them. https://newsroom.heart.org/news/myocarditis-risk-significantly-higher-after-covid-19-infection-vs-after-a-covid-19-vaccine https://newsroom.heart.org/news/myocarditis-risk-significant...
- Havoc 2y agoProcessed foods or microplastics come to mind
- _heimdall 2y agoDon't forget pharmaceuticals. The number of prescription drugs per capita and the number of childhood vaccines have both risen dramatically over the last few decades. We're speculating either way here, be it food or pharmaceuticals, so I'm not trying to claim that all drugs or vaccines are bad. The correlation is important though and should be on any list of culprits along with microplastics, chemical weapons used as pesticides and herbicides, processed foods, etc.
- Aachen 2y agoSummary: - It's not just increased screening/detection because mortality went up. This affects half of the 34 types studied. Examples mentioned are pancreatic, liver in women, various gut, colorectal, kidney, gallbladder, testicular, and breast (may have missed some because it's sprinkled throughout) - "there are likely unidentified risk factors but there are also known [ones], like sedentary behaviour, a change in diet, plus rising rates of obesity and diabetes." "[Many young patients] exercise regularly and eat healthily"; microplastics "fit the timeline [but] needs further investigation" - Earlier screening is being considered but comes with "expenses, radiation exposure and false positives"
- kaiwenwang 2y agoHijacking this thread to post some of my blog articles on nutrition/health. It's a topic I'm deeply concerned about. I frequently run into young people with thin hair, girls with endometriosis, and a bunch of stuff people should not be having at this age. https://kaiwenwang.com/writing/category/health https://kaiwenwang.com/writing/category/health I'd like to think my perception is insightful or at least novel on a variety of topics: exercise, pufas, vitamin A, indicators of health, plants don't want to be eaten, national food systems, rabbit teeth, glasses, and foldy ears.
- stavros 2y agoThe post about ears being an indicator of intelligence (and maybe propensity for crime?) is phrenology-level hysterical.
- dennis_jeeves2 2y ago>I'd like to think my perception is insightful or at least novel on a variety If you read/listened a lot, ( I'll try and define that more concretely if you wish as to what is a 'lot') almost none of what you mentioned above is novel or insightful to me. It certainly might be novel/insightful to an average person out there, but they really don't care. p.s 1 - let me look closely at your writing, An insight is something, but a cure is something else altogether. If you dig around my webpages, you might find something that may interest you including a link to pages on health on github. p.s 2 - quickly skimmed (so do hold not me responsible if I missed something) though the autoimmunity page and saw Vitamin D mentioned. A fellow by name (Prof) Trevor Marshall has a very different take on Vitamin D. Summary: it good for some people in the short run. but nearly always bad for most people in the long run. It certainly is not the simple hyper-vitaminosis theory.
- rapht 2y agoThe study seems US based only, I wonder if there's a similar trend in Europe -- that would help identifying if some of the potential environmental factors have been regulated out on the other side of the Atlantic.
- scrapheap 2y agoIt might not be an environmental cause - if people are genetically more susceptible to those cancers when aged between 20s and their 40s then a lot of people in the older age ranges would have already died from them before the year 2000 and so wouldn't be caught in their data. If they want to confirm it is an increase then they could repeat their analysis on a set of data covering years previous to 2000.
- ziggyzecat 2y agook, i'm gonna try a more civilized approach: I truly believe that much of the content (can be specified but the list would be long) on the many tubes poses a serious issue, directly and indirectly, and the speed, intervals and the timing at which the tubes are being consumed plays a crucial role. the article cites the academics and says that there are noteworthy hints at > generational shifts in cancer risk. by itself, and even without context, it makes total sense. behaviors and environments change over relatively short time periods; most notably, what people consume: a) actively, as in food, drinks, and media b) passively, as in pollutants and toxins, c) b in a, to a more than just relevant part. But most of that is obvious and there's plenty of discussion about it and the article clearly states that cancer happens in people who seem to be living a healthy lifestyle, except that, what we currently consider to be a healthy lifestyle, might be a pack of wolfs in sheep's clothing: I) supps, energy drinks that are labelled healthy, vapes, common party drugs laced with nonsense, etc., and theoretically healthy foods that are becoming more and more neutral, which kind of means that people are actually eating lesser amounts of healthy food, and even if the threshold is not reached, given how fucked up water, air (and soil) are, as well as temperatures, and unhealthy stress exposure, the bigger picture becomes critical and worthy of attention, especially if you include II) media consumption: the amount of lies on the news is brutal, the amount of perversion of truth and ignorance of fact just as bad and then there are false temporary partisanship, praising and celebrating death and weapon and ammo sales and all the hate and polarization that goes hand in hand with all this shit, and I really don't want to get into the brutal amount of celebrity bullshit, music videos, song lyrics and so on that give the back of your brain more than enough reason to work on fucking time and space travel and certainly, without anyone noticing, create plenty of psychopath-serial-killer-brain cells. All this stress builds up and it has nothing to do with weak men coming out of weak times. It's been only 10 - 20 years in the different "categories" I mentioned. But then there's another topic: the patterns, methods, and characteristics of how consumption occurs. - supps and shakes, but let's ignore those for now, because I want to bring attention to - perfectly healthy people consuming shit on the tubes and via ads everywhere, in intervals and timings that our brains actually need to wind down, to not see or hear anything, to, if necessary, have the energy to tune out the other senses: in transit, breaks, on the fucking toilet, for fucks sake, in waiting lines and rooms and those 35 seconds in front of the micro wave and so on - i'm certain y'all have more and better examples. Sure, a certain cognitive level, aka intelligence & devotion, protect via attention, mindfulness, healthy obsession and so on, but even that kind of humans, feels the stress build up, which is why they spend money and thought on proper recovery. But not everyone has and does that. an anecdote: parents growing up in the soviet union on their own farms: perfectly healthy food, unhealthy drink, no media, die late, relatively rarely of cancer but theres plenty of wear & tear and an increasing rate of freaking Alzheimer's. They move abroad and wonder why children get pimples and zits and allergies. Children stop drinking cheap milk and eating cheap cheese and processed sweets and pimples and zits go away and even the acne and allergies get much better. father stops watching news and the family lives in peace, no unhealthy stress whatsoever, work is a place to make money and compete athletically (if you are the type). but then younger kids get smartphones, consume media all the time, in classically peaceful moments and or moments like i mentioned before: seconds and minutes in the void, so to speak. they develop temporary tics, mimic strange behaviors and dumb speech, their attention 'is weird' and moody, the ways they see and explore the world are 'strange' and they radiate unhealthy stress, mania and obsession quite a fucking lot. i excluded auto-immune stuff on purpose. cancer is rare. especially in healthy people with healthy lifestyles. brains are still largely a complex puzzle with many mechanisms we are not aware of. the changes in media and food consumption in the previous years, the lack of 'void', especially regarding emerging risks in the functioning parts of humanity, deserve much more attention.
- more_corn 2y agoHuh, how about looking at the largest mass poisoning in human history. Human excrement is now so toxic it cannot be used as fertilizer.
- bookaway 2y ago>Human excrement is now so toxic it cannot be used as fertilizer. This sounds fascinating, where can I read more.