The rise in early-onset cancers has drawn a growing number of scientists into a shared investigation: not into the inherited traits that remain largely unchanged as a cause of cancer across generations, but into the ways modern life might be rewriting the body’s cellular fate. The new research direction examines the “exposome” — the full range of environmental exposures a person experiences throughout his or her life, even before birth — and how those exposures interact with biology.
John Ioannidis, a professor of medicine, epidemiology and population health at Stanford University, said research that searches for correlations across large datasets is highly susceptible to producing spurious results. While he believes there is strong and growing data that there are a lot of harmful exposures in today’s environment, he emphasized, “We should not panic and think everything new we live with is toxic.”
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Researchers say the surge in cancer cases among young adults reflects a deeper trend in human health: A number of major diseases, from heart disease to Alzheimer’s disease, aren’t just being detected earlier — they’re actually starting earlier in life.
