ARE YOUNG PEOPLE AGING FASTER?

And is that why cancer is striking earlier and earlier?

- SARAH ELIZABETH RICHARDS

WHEN ANDREW CHAN, M.D., became a gastroenterologist two decades ago, he had to get used to the brutal reality that seemingly healthy young people would show up in his office with colorectal cancer. Even though he specialized in high-risk cancer genetics, they didn't all have family histories of the disease. Some were marathoners. Some were vegetarians. Some didn't drink.

At the time, "early onset" patients made up less than 10 percent of his caseload. Then about a decade ago, he started getting more of them. Today it's more than double that—a trend he calls "truly stunning" because they're his age or even 20 years younger. Dr. Chan, a professor at Harvard Medical School, just turned 50. So he decided to help solve one of the decade's most disturbing medical mysteries: Why are increasing numbers of young adults being diagnosed with cancers that have historically been linked to old age? Recent research by the American Cancer Society adds urgency to his mission: It uncovered the disturbing fact that out of 34 cancers, 17 were rising in younger people—including nine types of cancer that have been dropping in older people.

What's Going On?

THERE ARE A lot of leads to chase: Did we eat too many processed foods as kids and mess up our microbiomes? Ingest too many microplastics or absorb too many "forever chemicals"? Was it too much binge drinking or burning the midnight oil? Is it the rising rate of obesity? Or something else entirely?

These questions are what prompted Dr. Chan to step up to be a leader of Team Prospect, a $25 million project funded by the National Cancer Institute along with research groups in the UK, France, Italy, and India. The initiative will enlist epidemiologists, clinicians, chemists, computational scientists, and microbiome experts to investigate all these possibilities.