Act your age, young people, and don’t grow up so fast!
According to research presented at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting, which took place from April 5th-10th, accelerated aging is to blame for the recent troubling trend of rising rates of some cancers like breast, colorectal, kidney, thyroid, lymphoma, and leukemia in young adults.
A possible underlying mechanism is inflammaging or chronic inflammation that drives aging. Inflammaging is a word that we defined here and wrote about in an article entitled, Age of posterity: Anti-inflammaging – a very modern dichotomy.
Triggering factors for inflammaging include all the usual suspects: obesity, lack of exercise, smoking and vaping, excessive alcohol intake, air pollutants, sleep deprivation, diets high in saturated fats, red meat, processed meat, and sugar, and low in fruits, vegetables, whole grains and fiber, night shift work, human papilloma virus (HPV) and hepatitis B virus (HBV) exposure, and mental stress.
So, don’t neglect yearly checkups, consider screening earlier for colorectal cancer, cervical, and breast cancer especially if family history is positive or deleterious lifestyle factors are present, stop smoking/vaping, reduce alcohol intake, lose weight, sleep more, vaccinate against HPV and HBV, maybe eat less at Mickey D’s, and exercise, exercise, exercise, which is the best medicine of all! Yeah, yeah, we know, those are all easier said than done. Still, they beat the alternative.
A quote from the singer, Prince, is to “act your age not your shoe size.”
All due respect to Prince, our advice is not to act your age or your shoe size 👞👟👠. Instead, rediscover your inner child, the one with smaller shoe sizes and hopefully less detrimental habits, since pediatric cancers account for less than 1% of all cases.