Are Cancer Rates Really Increasing in Younger People?

Cancer is a scary word at any age. But a cancer diagnosis in someone with decades of expected life ahead of them feels especially unjust. Concerning headlines about a global “epidemic” of cancer in younger people and high-profile cases such as Princess Catherine of Wales and Chadwick Boseman are unsettling and make us feel vulnerable.

Source: Bermix Studio/Unsplash

Epidemiologists spend their lives documenting and explaining trends in disease, so we can (hopefully) make things better. But it turns out that even that first step of describing a trend is trickier than it seems.

If You Can't Measure It, You Can't Improve It

Measurement is both the basis and bane of science, and health science is no different.

As we’ve seen with recent discussions about rising autism rates, interpreting trends over time is not as easy as following a line on a graph. Why? Because an observed “trend” combines two separate things:

1. The “true” change in an underlying condition (if we had perfect measurement)
2. Changes in how likely we are to diagnose a condition

The ease of separating these two components of measurement depends a lot on the type of outcome. For things you can measure with a literal yardstick—like height—the objective “truth” is easier to track over time.

We can be confident we've gotten taller over time.

Source: OurWorldinData.org CC BY

But even with “objective” measurements like height or weight, our trends can be biased by who we measure. Our national estimates come from large surveys designed to be representative, not door-to-door measurements of every citizen. (These national health surveys are currently under threat, but that’s a sad story for another day.) Who agrees to participate in those surveys can change over time, potentially biasing trends even in easy-to-measure outcomes.

On the other end of the measurement spectrum, mental health conditions like anxiety and depression can’t be measured with a physical yardstick. Increases in awareness and decreases in stigma around mental health over time make it more challenging to separate out “true” changes in population mental health from changes in diagnoses. We all know older people who could have benefited from mental health treatment but would never think to seek out help— and thus were never “counted” as diagnosed.

Cancer falls somewhere in the middle of this measurement spectrum. Tumors are physical things, but we don’t scan every American every year to look for them. As screening and imaging become more widespread and sensitive, we pick up more cancers, including slow-growing or clinically insignificant ones that might never have shortened someone’s life. This detection effect doesn’t necessarily imply no changes in underlying cancer rates, but it does mean we need to be mindful of separating out “real” change from changes in measurement.

A recent JAMA Internal Medicine piece directly tackled this question. The investigators tracked the eight cancers with the fastest-rising incidence since 1990 (>1 percent per year) in U.S. adults younger than 50 years (cancer of the thyroid, anus, kidney, small intestine, colorectum, endometrium, pancreas, and myeloma).

The major finding was that while the incidence (new cases) rate of these cancers has more than doubled, mortality has stayed constant.

Combined Cancer Incidence and Mortality for the Fastest-Rising Cancers in US Adults Younger Than 50 Years

Source: Adamson AS, Welch HG. JAMA Intern Med. 2025;185(11):1370–1374.

This topline result is quite reassuring. We are not seeing dramatic increases in cancer mortality in young people.

But combining 8 different cancers might obscure what’s happening with specific cancers. Two cancers did show rising mortality: colorectal and endometrial.

• Colorectal cancer mortality has increased about 0.5 percent per year since 2004, which is more slowly than incidence rates, but still an increase. This suggests at least some “true” increase in clinically meaningful disease, not just more detection.
• Endometrial cancer showed similar rates of increase in both incidence and mortality, suggesting genuine increases which the authors speculate may be due to rising obesity and declining hysterectomy rates.

For the other six cancers, incidence went up while mortality was stable or declined, a pattern consistent with increased detection rather than increases in disease.

Site-Specific Incidence and Mortality for the Fastest-Rising Cancers in US Adults Younger Than Age 50 Years

Source: Adamson AS, Welch HG. JAMA Intern Med. 2025;185(11):1370–1374.

While breast cancer didn’t make the “fastest-rising” list, incidence rates have increased for women under 50. Despite this, breast cancer mortality rates have fallen over this time, likely due to improvements in treatment. This was also true for kidney cancer and melanoma, with mortality rates decreasing despite rising incidence.

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But this highlights another complication with interpreting trends: Improved cancer survival could make mortality look flat even if the true incidence is rising. While this possibility is hard to rule out, the authors note that the increased cancer incidence has mostly been seen in early-stage rather than more advanced cancers, consistent with increased detection.

Looking at the big picture, we see:

• No evidence of an “epidemic.” Cancer mortality in young people is stable or falling.
• Some cancers deserve attention. Colorectal cancer, in particular, has shown modest mortality increases in this age group.
• Absolute risks remain low. For example, colorectal cancer incidence in under-50s rose from 6.6 to 7.6 per 100,000 people between 2010 and 2019 in the US. While this is worth watching, the absolute numbers are low.

Because cancer detection, treatment, and survival are all changing at the same time, trends are a moving target. The authors of the JAMA Internal Medicine piece make a strong case that the dramatic increases in some cancers are most likely due to increased detection, but we should always be open to new data as it emerges.

This topic raises important questions about trade-offs inherent in many types of screening. Expanded screening (such as the heavily marketed full-body MRI scans) is not without costs--it can bring false positives, harm from unnecessary treatment, anxiety, and higher costs in already overstretched health systems. But early detection can also save lives. Finding the right balance between optimal preventive screening and avoiding “overdiagnosis” is genuinely hard, with no one-size-fits-all answers.

Bottom Line: No Cancer "Epidemic" in Young People

Every cancer death is tragic, and we would never want to downplay its seriousness or the pain it causes families. But fortunately, the evidence suggests there is not an epidemic of cancer in younger people. The rise in some cancer diagnoses is plausibly explained by better detection. But a few concerning trends, particularly colorectal and endometrial cancers, merit continued attention.