from Hacker News

Colorectal cancer incidence in teens up 300% since 1999

by tompccs on 5/13/24, 6:07 PM with 49 comments

  • by ale42 on 5/13/24, 8:42 PM

    Has this been observed in other countries too or just in USA/North America? Exposure to various chemicals and food habits are vastly different, if those are the source (which are the first culprits I'd consider) of cancer increase, then numbers should also be very different elsewhere.

  • by HPsquared on 5/13/24, 7:53 PM

    Dietary changes in the population seem the first place to look. That or contamination of some kind?

    EDIT: or do we simply have better screening now?

  • by oldgradstudent on 5/13/24, 10:37 PM

    The numbers seem to be inconsistent with other studies.

    The following paper gives incidence of 0.2/100,000 for 15-19 year olds in recent years, while the post claims a rise from 0.3 in 1999 to 1.3 today.

    https://acsjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.3322/caac...

  • by AndrewOMartin on 5/14/24, 9:39 AM

    From 0.3 per 100,000 to 1.3 per 100,000. Not saying this isn't significant, but whenever you see a phrase like "increase of x%" it's often worth your time to see what that is in absolute terms.

  • by zumafan on 5/13/24, 8:19 PM

    Similar to the increase in prescriptions of accutane for acne in teens. Coincidence?

    https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11907498/

  • by duffpkg on 5/13/24, 10:10 PM

    It's easy to jump to conclusions from this one single meta analysis however based on my experience I would want to see a more deep dive review. I would guess that underreporting, especially in the pre-2010 era after which electronic medical records became much more prevalent, as well as the changeover to ICD10 from ICD9, are likely culprits. Data quality in healthcare today is a D- at best, 20 years ago it was absolute and total garbage. Though this persists today, the excel 65k row limitation and excel date bugs are reponsible for an unimaginable amount of healthcare data destruction.

    Up until 2012 even, most CDC reporting was done as manual chart reviews typed into an excel sheet. That was a very error prone process.

  • by mharig on 5/14/24, 12:30 PM

    The EPIC Oxford study showed that vegetarians are more likely to die from colon cancer than the control group, "health food buyers". But the effect canceled more or less out, because the health food buyers did die more often from CVDs.

    YMMV

  • by Qem on 5/13/24, 6:34 PM

    Cellphone use? Colon position is close to pocket height, where our cellphones tend to stay while not charging or being actively manipulated. Someone should try to correlate tumor starting location with handedness. If it tends to start the same side the dominant hand is, that would be a smoking gun.