Reading the article, it looks like that is when people started to get really really fat and develop type ii diabetes in large scale. Fat people are much more likely to get pancreatic cancer.
Last I checked the islets of langerhans that control sugar are located in the pancreas.
Between 1999 and 2023, deaths surged 70%.
studying THAT should provide some clues ...
People use to die from other things before diseases like cancer got to them.