Iana dos Reis Nunes was 43 when she told her husband that she could feel something like a bubble in her abdomen when she lay on her side. An ultrasound scan found spots on her liver, which led to blood tests and a colonoscopy.
“There was a tumor the size of your fist, and she had no pain and no problems with bowel movements or anything like that,” recalled Brendan Higgins, her husband, who works as an artist in New York City. By the time doctors found it, dos Reis Nunes’ colon cancer had spread. It was stage 4, meaning it had reached other parts of her body. The family was blindsided.
“She had had a baby 15 months prior to her diagnosis, so she’d had a million blood tests, you know, care from doctors and sonograms … and there was no indication of anything, nothing whatsoever.” When cancer strikes an adult under the age of 50, doctors call it an early-onset case. These cancers at younger ages are becoming more common.
A new review of cancer registry records from 44 countries found that the incidence of early-onset cancers is rising rapidly for colorectal and 13 other types of cancers, many of which affect the digestive system, and this increase is happening across many middle- and high-income nations.
The review’s authors say the upswing in younger adults in happening in part because of more sensitive testing for some cancer types, such as thyroid cancer. But testing doesn’t completely account for the trend, says co-author Shuji Ogino, a professor of pathology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Ogino says the spike is due to an unhealthy stew of risk factors that are probably working together, some which are known and others that need to be investigated. He notes that many of these risks have established links to cancer like obesity, inactivity, diabetes, alcohol, smoking, environmental pollution, and Western diets high in red meat and added sugars, not to mention shift work and lack of sleep. “And there are many unknown risk factors as well, like a pollutant or like food additives. Nobody knows,” he said.
Meanwhile, Scientists are working on a cancer vaccine that will be personalized for individual patients. The new jab will be used to treat patients with high-risk melanoma – the deadliest form of skin cancer. The game-changing vaccine, which could prevent thousands of deaths each year, is in the second of three trials. Manufacturers Moderna and Merck have said results of the trial, which will determine whether it stops cancer coming back, are expected by the end of the year.
The experimental vaccine is based on the same messenger RNA (mRNA) technology that was used to create the revolutionary Covid vaccines. The cancer shot is tailored for each patient to generate T-cells – a key part of the body’s immune response – based on the specific mutational signature of each tumor.
mRNA vaccines are usually cheaper to produce than traditional vaccines. However, personalized vaccines are very expensive. There are various forms of skin cancer that generally fall under non-melanoma and melanoma. Non-melanoma skin cancers, diagnosed a combined 147,000 times a year in the UK, kill around 720 people a year in the UK.
