The number of cancer cases among young women is alarmingly high.
Women under 50 are 82% more likely to develop cancer than their male counterparts, with cancer rates among young women “rising from 51% higher than men in 2002 to 82% higher in 2021”, according to a report from the American Cancer Society.
Driving these numbers is the increase in invasive breast cancer, the report says, which increased by 1% each year between 2012 and 2021. And in women under 50, the disease has increased by 1.4% per year.
The study mentions risk factors such as obesity, later delivery and fewer deliveries as possible contributing factors.
Deaths from uterine cancer are also increasing because, according to the study, it is “one of the few cancers with increasing mortality; from 2013 to 2022, the mortality rate increased by 1.5% per year.”
Colon cancer also makes the list, where rates among people under 50 have risen 2.4% per year and death rates have risen 1% per year.
Pancreatic cancer has also seen a steady 1% annual increase in diagnoses since the mid-1990s – and mortality is also increasing, albeit at a slower pace.
“These adverse trends are biased toward women,” said Rebecca L. Seigel, an epidemiologist at the American Cancer Society and the first author of the report, told the New York Times.
“Of all the cancers that are increasing, some are increasing in men, but it is skewed: this increase is happening more often in women,” she added.
Meanwhile, Neil Iyengar, an oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, told the newspaper that the increase in “a variety of cancers in younger people, especially young women, suggests that there is something broader going on than variations in individual genetics or population genetics.”
