Associate Professor, Department of Medicine, Yale School of Medicine; Director, Clinical and Translational Research Accelerator, Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut, your weekly dose of commentary on a new medical study. I'm Dr F. Perry Wilson of the Yale School of Medicine.
But even the cancer incidence rate is not entirely clear-cut. After all, the population of the United States is older now than it was in 1960, for example, and age is the major risk factor for most cancers.
I was born in 1979, the tail end of Gen X. My childhood was spent riding a bike without a helmet, listening to Duran Duran and Wham!, and staying up late to watch Sandler and Farley on SNL. Simpler times. From a public health perspective, my generation was really one of the first to have a clear understanding, from a very young age, of cancer risk factors. We were the ones told to"just say no," though the effect was not that profound.
I'm going to start with a straightforward example. Here are the rates of lung cancer at age 60 among women and men, as a function of birth year. The broad trend is fairly clear: People born in more modern times have a lower risk of getting lung cancer by the time they turn 60. Okay, what's going on here? There are some benign explanations — pardon the pun. We have made significant strides in reducing the rate of heart disease in the population over the past 100 years. As deaths from heart disease decline, a greater number of people live long enough to be diagnosed with cancer. Of course, age-adjusting the cancer rates should account for this.