Researchers at the Boston-based Brigham and Women's Hospital found early-onset cancers diagnosed before age 50 are on the rise.
Researchers analyzed global data of 14 cancer types as well as studies examining trends in possible risk factors, and compared those to characteristics of early-onset and later-onset cancers.
The results, published in Nature Reviews Clinical Oncology on Sept. 6, found a possible correlation between early-life exposure to early-onset cancer.
Possible risk factors include alcohol consumption, sleep deprivation, smoking, obesity and eating highly processed foods. Although adult sleep duration has not changed significantly over the decades, researchers found children are getting less sleep today than in previous decades.
"From our data, we observed something called the birth cohort effect. This effect shows that each successive group of people born at a later time have a higher risk of developing cancer later in life, likely due to risk factors they were exposed to at a young age," Shuji Ogino, MD, PhD, a professor and physician in the department of pathology at Brigham and Women's, said in a shared with Becker's. "We found that this risk is increasing with each generation. For instance, people born in 1960 experienced higher cancer risk before they turn 50 than people born in 1950, and we predict that this risk level will continue to climb in successive generations."