Kate Middleton’s Cancer: Are we increasingly vulnerable at an early age, and why?

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Photo credit, Kensington Palace/BBC Studios

image captionThe Princess of Wales announces her cancer diagnosis at the age of 42Article information

• Author, Marie-Jose Al Azzi
• Role, BBC News Arabic

• 5 hours ago

Princess Kate Middleton’s announcement that she had been diagnosed with cancer at the age of 42 shocked many.

No one expected that the Princess of Wales’ absence from public activities for a few months would be linked to a malignant tumor, and rumors abounded that she had gone into hiding after the announcement of his abdominal operation.

After weeks of speculation, she was forced to appear in a video and provide answers to concerned people around the world.

Since the announcement of the young princess, many have returned to a study published last September in the British Medical Journal, which confirms that the incidence of cancer at an early age, that is to say before the age of 50, has increased overall by 79.1% between 1990 and 2019.

The number of deaths from early cancer increased by 27.7% between 1990 and 2019.

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Researchers who participated in the study predict that the global number of cancer cases and early-life deaths will increase from 31% to 21% by 2030.

The researchers estimated that dietary risk factors, such as high red meat consumption, low fruit consumption, high sodium consumption, low milk consumption, as well as alcohol and tobacco consumption, were the main factors causing the appearance of cancers at an early age.

Another study published in The Lancet, a peer-reviewed medical journal, found that cancer was the fourth leading cause of death among people aged 15 to 39 in 2019 worldwide.

It is in countries where socio-economic development is the greatest that we observe the greatest increase in the number of cancer diagnoses in this age group.

Although most experts and doctors agree that certain dietary factors increase the risk of cancer, other experts emphasize that cancer is a complex disease that is influenced by a combination of factors, including genetics. and exposure to various dietary, environmental, and other factors over a person’s lifetime. It is therefore unlikely that there is a single, simple explanation for this increase.

Is obesity to blame?

Several increasingly common cancers among young people in the United States are linked to obesity, according to a 2019 study published in The Lancet.

About 39.8% of U.S. adults ages 20 to 39 are obese, according to the nation’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The study confirmed that half of obesity-related cancers are increasingly common among young people, compared to one in nine non-obesity-related cancers.

Experts agree that excessive consumption of processed foods, lack of physical exercise and regular alcohol consumption are all factors that increase the risk of cancer.

Specialists believe that the prevalence of these factors has increased due to modern lifestyles, which could explain why people under the age of 50 have started to develop the disease in recent years.

In a study published by the US National Library of Medicine on its website, researchers found a possible link between a pregnant woman experiencing obesity during pregnancy and the impact on her baby later, causing cancer before pregnancy. age of fifty. However, this theory still requires research to be confirmed.

Dr Daniel Huang, a hepatologist at the National University of Singapore, told the British medical journal Nature that these factors are not enough to explain the increase in the number of cancers diagnosed at young ages.

“Many have speculated that obesity and alcohol consumption could explain some of our results. But it seems we need to dive deeper into the data,” he says, to understand the whole picture.

In fact, many people who eat healthily, exercise, are not obese, and are under 50 get cancer. How to explain this phenomenon ?

When is the fetus formed?

Recent statistics show that cancers related to the gastrointestinal tract are among the most common cancers worldwide, accounting for the largest proportion of cancers affecting people under the age of 50.

A study published a year ago on the U.S. National Library of Medicine website found that certain gut microbes can cause cancer because they can act as promoters or inhibitors of the disease.

Although this phenomenon is partly linked to the food we eat, it is also linked to the microbes and viruses we are exposed to, such as Helicobacter pylori, hepatitis B and C viruses and human papillomavirus, according to the same study.

Other experts suggest that disruptions in the composition of the microbiome (beneficial bacteria in the gut) can be caused not only by dietary changes but also by taking antibiotics, but research into the carcinogenic potential of antibiotics is ongoing and the results are inconclusive.

Epidemiologist Barbara Kohn, of the Institute of Public Health in Oakland, California, told the scientific journal Nature that research has shown that cancer can appear many years after a person is exposed to a carcinogen, such as asbestos, which is used in cement, and cigarette smoke. “If the latency period (at the origin of the lesion) goes back decades, where do we start looking (to discover the triggers of the disease)?

She notes that researchers need to collect data spanning at least 40 to 60 years, involving thousands of people, in order to have a sample size large enough to draw conclusions about early onset of cancer.

Mr. Kohn maintains a huge database of blood samples collected from about 20,000 pregnant mothers since 1959. Researchers have followed the cases of many participants and their children since then.

Kohn and Caitlin Murphy, an epidemiologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, tried to look for the factors that cause cancer in its early stages.

They found a possible link between early-onset colon cancer and prenatal exposure to a synthetic form of progesterone, sometimes prescribed to pregnant women to prevent premature birth. However, this study needs to be replicated in other groups of people so that researchers can confirm their findings.

Dr Kimmy Ng of Harvard University says certain environmental factors that people are exposed to very early in life may play a role in their later development.

Specializing in gastroenterology, she studies the reasons for the increase in the number of cancers among people under 50 around the world. Its main hypothesis concerns the exposure of individuals in the womb, infancy or childhood, and the link between this exposure and cancer at a young age.

According to the American Cancer Society, lifestyle can play a role in cancer, as can exposure to environmental factors such as radon, air pollution, workplace chemicals or radiation emitted during medical tests or procedures.

Is prevention possible?

According to the American Cancer Society, approximately 80,000 people ages 20 to 39 are diagnosed with cancer each year in the United States.

Cancer is the fourth cause of death in this age group, after accidents, suicides and homicides. Young women are more likely to develop cancer than young men, but both sexes have the same risk of dying from cancer.

Statistics from other countries around the world show a similar trend when it comes to the number of cancer cases in the same age group.

Faced with medical uncertainty and the lack of conclusive results from scientific research, are there ways to prevent cancer or at least minimize the likelihood of developing certain types of cancer?

All scientific and medical authorities agree on the measures to take to minimize the risk of developing certain types of cancer:

• Refrain from smoking or being exposed to cigarette smoke from others.

• Maintain a healthy weight, exercise and physical activity.

• Adopt a healthy and varied diet by limiting the consumption of processed products and red meat and eating more whole grains and foods rich in fiber.

• Limit time spent in the sun and avoid tanning beds.

• Adopt safe sexual practices to minimize the risk of contracting HPV and HIV.

While there are many theories as to why cancer rates increase at young ages, the most popular is lifestyle.

In a striking comparison, Dr. Shoji Ogino and Dr. Tomotaka Ogai of Harvard University examined and compared data from around the world to help doctors and scientists understand what’s going on.

The doctors, who live and work in the United States but are originally from Japan, told Cancer Research UK that comparing cancer rates in Japan and South Korea raised many questions.

The two countries are ethnically and economically similar, but Japan is not seeing the same increase in early gastrointestinal cancers as its neighbor.

Japan is one of the few high-income countries where most people do not follow the Western diet, based on red meat and processed foods high in fat and sugar. The Japanese eat mainly fish, vegetables and legumes.

Most Japanese children walk or bike to school, rather than by bus or car, giving them a higher level of mobility and physical exertion than children in other countries.

The way of life in South Korea is very different, closer to the Western way of life in the United States and Western Europe. South Korea is seeing a sharp rise in cancer rates at young ages.