Faster Biological Aging Linked to Rising Cancer in Younger Adults

Cancer risk rises with age, but doctors are diagnosing more cancer in younger adults, with each newer generation appearing to face greater risk than the last. A study led by Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, published in Nature Medicine, finds younger generations may be aging faster biologically than older generations did at the same age, a shift that could help explain part of the trend.

Chronological age counts the years lived; biological age reflects how old the body appears based on changes in cells, organs and metabolism. Cancer risk rose as the gap between the two widened, and people from more recent generations tended to have larger gaps than those born earlier, suggesting their bodies appeared biologically older at the same age. Accelerated biological aging was linked to greater risk of early-onset cancers, diagnosed at 55 or younger.

Aging did not appear to affect every organ equally. An immune system that appeared biologically older was linked to early-onset lung cancer, while older-appearing fat tissue was associated with early-onset colorectal cancer.

The team, including first author Ruiyi Tian, studied over 154,000 young adults in the UK Biobank and over 10,000 U.S. participants in the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) All of Us Research Program. They measured whole-body aging with biomarkers such as PhenoAge, based on nine blood markers including albumin and creatinine, and organ-specific aging from proteomic data. In the UK group, people born between 1965 and 1974 showed systemic aging about 23% of one standard deviation higher than earlier-born participants. Cao, a molecular epidemiologist at WashU Medicine, co-leads Team PROSPECT under Cancer Grand Challenges. "Our ultimate goal is to decode how modern environments become biologically embedded to drive cancer risk, transforming prevention from broad recommendations to personalized interventions," she said.

Researchers say measurements of accelerated aging could help doctors identify younger people at unusually high cancer risk, potentially allowing prevention or screening to begin earlier.