Younger bodies are ageing faster, and the fastest agers carry a 15% higher cancer risk

People born in more recent generations are ageing faster biologically than their parents and grandparents did at the same chronological age, and the ones ageing fastest carry a 15% higher risk of being diagnosed with cancer before age 55, according to a study led by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. The study, published in Nature Medicine on June 22 and resurfaced by ScienceDaily’s coverage this month, compared birth cohorts in the United Kingdom and the United States and found the generational gap in biological age has been widening for decades. Early-onset cancer already means anything diagnosed at 55 or younger, and the researchers wanted to know whether faster ageing itself, not just any single risk factor, could help explain why it keeps rising.

Yin Cao, the WashU Medicine molecular epidemiologist who led the analysis, said the team’s ultimate goal is to decode how modern environments become biologically embedded to drive cancer risk, turning prevention from broad, population-wide recommendations into interventions tailored to one patient’s biology.

Two Datasets Showed the Same Widening Generational Gap

Cao’s team, including first author Ruiyi Tian, analyzed data from more than 154,000 adults in the United Kingdom’s Biobank and more than 10,000 participants in a National Institutes of Health precision-medicine cohort study enrolling people across the United States. In the UK cohort, people born between 1965 and 1974 showed systemic ageing 23% of one standard deviation higher than those born between 1950 and 1954, after accounting for chronological age. In the American cohort, the gap was far wider: people born between 1990 and 1999 showed systemic ageing 92% of one standard deviation higher than those born between 1965 and 1969.

That widening gap, measured across two separate health systems and two different generations of birth cohorts, is what let the researchers argue the pattern is not a quirk of one dataset. The increased systemic ageing in the younger UK group tracked with an 8% higher risk of early-onset solid cancers overall, concentrated in lung, gastrointestinal, uterine and colorectal cancers. When participants were split into three tiers by how advanced their systemic ageing was, the group with the most advanced ageing carried a 15% higher risk of early-onset solid cancer than the group with the least advanced ageing, a gap that held even after the researchers controlled for inherited genetic cancer risk and genetic susceptibility to accelerated ageing itself.

Immune-System Ageing Tracked With Lung Cancer, Fat-Tissue Ageing With Colorectal

Beyond measuring the body as a whole, Cao’s team broke the analysis down by organ system using blood proteomic data, which estimates how old an individual organ’s proteins look compared with a person’s actual age. An immune system that looked older than its chronological age was associated specifically with a higher risk of early-onset lung cancer. Fat tissue that looked older than its chronological age was associated specifically with a higher risk of early-onset colorectal cancer, a pairing the researchers had not expected going in.

The organ-specific split matters because it points toward which biological pathway might be driving which cancer, rather than treating “faster ageing” as one undifferentiated risk. WashU Medicine’s account of the findings notes the team used established clinical biomarker measures, including PhenoAge and the Klemera-Doubal Method, alongside a metabolomic age score built from blood chemistry, to arrive at each participant’s systemic age gap.

PhenoAge Reads Nine Blood Markers Most Patients Never See

PhenoAge, one of the two clinical biomarker tools the team relied on, measures nine blood biochemistry markers, including albumin made by the liver and creatinine filtered out by the kidneys, none of which show up on a standard annual physical. Combining that kind of biomarker panel with genomic and proteomic data is what let the researchers detect a systemic age gap that would be invisible to a doctor going only by a patient’s chart and chronological age.

Cao has spent years identifying individual factors tied to early-onset cancer risk, including obesity, alcohol use, sedentary behavior, poor diet quality and cesarean delivery, according to ScienceDaily’s write-up of the research. Each of those factors on its own only explains a modest share of the rising risk, which is why Cao’s team, in the paper published in Nature Medicine, built a measure meant to capture the combined effect of many risk factors operating together across a person’s life course.

Cancer Grand Challenges Is Funding the Effort to Explain Why

The work is part of Team PROSPECT, a research group Cao co-leads under Cancer Grand Challenges, a funding initiative co-founded by Cancer Research UK and the National Cancer Institute. David Scott, the initiative’s director, said the field does not yet have a definitive answer for what is driving the global rise in early-onset cancers, but said studies like this one are helping researchers assemble the larger picture — showing that cancer may be shaped not only by changes inside individual cells, but by wider changes happening across the body as a whole.

Cao’s next step is tracing how environmental, lifestyle and societal shifts leave a lasting biological imprint on a person’s ageing trajectory, work aimed at flagging who carries the highest risk while they are still healthy rather than after a diagnosis. Whether that translates into a blood test any primary care doctor can order is still years away, but the organ-specific pattern gives the next round of research a narrower target than “ageing” alone ever offered.

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This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.