Faster ageing might be driving early-onset cancers

Hello Nature readers,
This week, we hear that cancers are on the rise globally, discover that an increase in early-onset cancers could be tied to faster biological ageing and learn that breast cancer tends to be more aggressive up to three years after giving birth.

Global cancers to rise in the coming decades

The World Health Organization (WHO) has predicted that up to 35 million people could be diagnosed with cancer each year by 2050, up from around 21 million diagnosed in 2024. Factors such as an ageing population, alcohol consumption, obesity and screening improvements will likely drive cancer rates up 67% over the next two decades. Lower-income countries will be disproportionately affected because of poorer access to healthcare. “Far too many people are still being left behind,” says André Ilbawi, who leads the cancer control team at the WHO.

Young people might be ageing faster

Early-onset cancers might be increasing worldwide because younger people are ageing faster than older generations. Using data from more than 150,000 people in the UK Biobank, researchers found that the gaps between biological and chronological ages were larger in people born between 1965 and 1974 than those born between 1950 and 1954. This result was mirrored in a US cohort of more than 10,000 people. Over 15 years, people who biologically aged faster were more likely to be diagnosed with lung, gastrointestinal and uterine cancers at a younger age. “It is possible that [young people] are being exposed to new cancer-causing risks or that [our] defences to them are somehow altered,” says haematologist Jyoti Nangalia.

Trained T cells help kids with deadly cancer

Four children with terminal brain cancer are alive years after receiving an experimental therapy that boosts the number of immune cells that can recognize cancer proteins. Three of these kids have no evidence of disease. The treatment, called tumour-associated antigen T-cell therapy, was given to 33 children and young adults with newly diagnosed diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG) or other treatment-resistant brain tumours. Kids with DIPG usually survive for less than a year after diagnosis but one child with this type of cancer survived for more than two years after treatment. Three further participants with other types of brain tumours were alive two, three and four years after receiving the T-cell therapy.

Painless test accurately detects oral cancer

A swab-based test that produces results within the hour could screen for oral cancer without people having to undergo a painful biopsy. The test “gives clinicians a rapid, accurate, and non-invasive way to triage patients, and crucially, it can be repeated,” says oral oncologist Muy-Teck Teh. Across 545 people given ‘brush biopsies’, the test was 95.5% accurate.

Transplants for advanced lung cancer

A study has challenged the idea that people with advanced lung cancer don’t benefit from lung transplants. All 17 people with lung-confined advanced cancer given a lung transplant were alive a year later, compared with half of the 81 people given other treatments. “This work changes what we can imagine for a highly selected group of patients who were previously ​considered beyond the reach of curative-intent intervention,” says thoracic surgeon and co-author Ankit Bharat.

WHO publishes global breast cancer stats

For the first time, the World Health Organization has released breast cancer survival estimates across all 194 member states. The five-year survival was 42% in low-income countries and 88% in high-income countries. The authors call for “sustained initiatives to narrow gaps in access to diagnosis and treatment for breast cancer” to address these “profound global inequities”.

Cancer worse for three years postpartum

Pregnancy is known to change breast tissue and make cancers more aggressive. But whether the effect lasts a few years or a decade has been debated. A study of 385 people with early breast cancer has now gone some way towards settling that debate, finding that people one to three years postpartum have a higher risk of recurrence than do people who gave birth more than three years before their cancer diagnosis.