There has been a dramatic rise in gastrointestinal cancers in people under the age of 50, according to a new review.
Gastrointestinal cancers, such as colorectal cancer and pancreatic cancer, “represent the most rapidly increasing early-onset cancer in the US,” researchers wrote in a review published in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Thursday.
Colorectal cancer, which develops in the colon or rectum, was the most common among early-onset gastrointestinal cancers in the U.S. in 2022, with just over 20,800 people diagnosed.
There were 2,689 diagnoses of Gastric cancer, which develops in the stomach lining, that year, followed by 2,657 diagnoses of pancreatic cancer and 875 diagnoses of esophageal cancer.
Most early-onset gastrointestinal cancers are linked to risk factors that could be changed, such as obesity, poor-quality diet, and a somewhat inactive lifestyle. Smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol are other risk factors.
“It’s really what people were doing or exposed to when they were infants, children, adolescents that is probably contributing to their risk of developing cancer as a young adult,” Dr. Kimmie Ng, the review’s co-author and director of the Young-Onset Colorectal Cancer Center at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, told NBC News.
There are also risk factors that patients don’t have control over such as family history and hereditary syndromes. People with early-onset colorectal cancer could have inflammatory bowel disease.
Researchers wrote in the review: “The prognosis for patients with early-onset GI cancers is similar to or worse than that for patients with later-onset GI cancers, highlighting the need for improved methods of prevention and early detection.”
The American Cancer Society recommends people at average risk of colorectal cancer start regular screening at the age of 45. Before 2018, the ACS recommended screenings start at the age of 50.
“It never used to happen in this age group, and now a very significant rise in 20-, 30- and 40-year-olds are getting colon cancer,” Dr. John Marshall, chief medical consultant at the nonprofit Colorectal Cancer Alliance, who was not involved in the review, told NBC News.
It’s still unclear why young patients with gastrointestinal cancers could have worse survival rates than older patients.
“My personal feeling is that it’s because we’re finding them at a more advanced stage, because people don’t really think of colon or other GI cancers when they see a young person with these nonspecific complaints,” Dr. Howard Hochster, director of gastrointestinal oncology at Rutgers Cancer Institute and RWJBarnabas Health in New Jersey, who was not involved in the review, told NBC News.
But Ng said even when taking the stage of cancer into account, young patients still seem to have worse survival rates, and questioned whether there’s a biological reason.
