Biological aging may explain rising early-onset cancer risk among younger generations globally.
An analysis of data from the UK Biobank and the U.S. All of Us Research Program found that accelerated biological aging correlates with a heightened risk of solid cancers before age 55. The PhenoAge metric indicated that participants born from 1965-1974 had a 23% higher age gap than those born between 1950-1954. Similarly, those born from 1990-1999 showed a 92% higher gap compared to their 1965-1969 counterparts.
The study analyzed over 953,582 person-years in the UK Biobank, revealing that each standard deviation increase in PhenoAge-defined age gap linked to an 8% increased risk of early-onset cancers, particularly lung and gastrointestinal cancers.
Organ-specific aging factors highlighted in proteomics analyses indicated that immune tissue aging relates to early lung cancer, and adipose tissue aging correlates with colorectal cancer. These results suggest that both systemic and organ-specific aging might be critical in understanding the rise in early-onset cancers across generations.