WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - A new study led by researchers at WashU Medicine suggests that younger generations may be aging faster biologically than older generations did at the same age, which might also be linked to a higher risk of developing cancer at a younger age.
'Our ultimate goal is to decode how modern environments become biologically embedded to drive cancer risk, transforming prevention from broad recommendations to personalized interventions,' said study author Yin Cao, a molecular epidemiologist and an associate professor of surgery and of medicine at WashU Medicine. 'This brings us closer to identifying risk earlier and developing prevention strategies that are tailored to an individual's biology.'
To investigate, researchers analyzed health and biological data from more than 154,000 young adults in the UK Biobank and over 10,000 participants in the U.S.-based National Institutes of Health (NIH) All of Us Research Program.
The team compared biological age, a measure of how old a person's body appears based on medical tests, with chronological age, which is a person's actual age. They found that people born between 1990 and 1999 showed signs of being biologically older than people born between 1965 and 1969 when both groups were at the same age. According to one measure used in the study, the younger group had a 92% larger biological age gap.
Researchers also looked at how biological aging changed across different birth groups. In the UK, people born between 1965 and 1974 showed slightly more advanced biological aging than those born between 1950 and 1954. A similar trend was seen in the U.S., where those born in the 1990s appeared to be aging faster biologically than those born in the late 1960s.
The study found that faster biological aging was linked to an 8% higher risk of developing early-onset solid cancers, particularly cancers of the lung, digestive system, and uterus. People with the highest levels of biological aging had a 15% greater risk of developing these cancers compared with those showing the lowest levels of aging. Notably, the link remained even after researchers accounted for inherited genetic risks for cancer and genes associated with faster aging.
The findings suggest that accelerated biological aging may be one reason why certain cancers are increasingly being diagnosed in younger adults.
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