Posted on 10/07/2025 4:34:32 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Researchers suggest increase does not necessarily reflect a rise in clinically meaningful cancers
Key Takeaways
The increase in early-onset cancers is not necessarily due to a rise in clinically meaningful cancers, researchers argued, but may be due to increased diagnostic scrutiny and overdiagnosis.
Of the eight fastest-rising cancers, only two -- colorectal and endometrial cancer -- have shown a slight increase in early-onset mortality.
For the six other cancers, stable or declining mortality rates alongside rising diagnoses suggest that greater detection (rather than more disease) may account for the trend.
The recent rise in the incidence of early-onset cancers does not necessarily mean that the occurrence of clinically meaningful cancer in young adults is increasing, researchers said.
Instead, while some of the increase in early-onset cancers may be clinically meaningful, much of it is likely caused by "increased diagnostic scrutiny and overdiagnosis," argued H. Gilbert Welch, MD, MPH, of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, and colleagues in JAMA Internal Medicine.
If clinically significant cancers are developing more frequently in young adults, those cancers should be leading to increased mortality at the population level, they suggested.
However, while the eight cancers with the fastest-rising incidence (>1% per year) in U.S. adults younger than 50 years -- thyroid, anus, kidney, small intestine, colorectum, endometrium, pancreas, and myeloma -- have doubled in incidence since 1992, "the aggregate mortality for these cancers has remained flat," they pointed out.
"Overall, the rise in early-onset cancer appears to be less an epidemic of disease and more an epidemic of diagnosis," Welch and colleagues wrote. "The lack of a substantial rise in deaths, despite rising incidence, underscores the need to provide context to the early-onset cancer narrative."
"While some of the increase in early-onset cancer is likely real, it is small and confined to a few cancer sites," they added. "The epidemic narrative not only exaggerates the problem, but it may also exacerbate it. While more testing is often seen as the solution to an epidemic, it can just as easily be the cause."
Of the eight cancers, only two -- colorectal and endometrial cancer -- have shown a slight increase in early-onset mortality.
Specifically, colorectal cancer mortality has increased approximately 0.5% per year since 2004, "suggesting some increase in the occurrence of clinically meaningful cancer," they noted. "However, its incidence has increased approximately 2% per year, raising the possibility that some of the rise in incidence may not involve clinically meaningful cancers."
As for endometrial cancer, incidence and mortality rates have both increased by about 2% per year, a trend they said was likely explained by increasing rates of obesity and decreasing rates of hysterectomy.
For the six other cancers, stable or declining mortality rates alongside rising diagnoses suggest that greater detection (rather than more disease) may account for the trend in the incidence of early-onset cancer.
For example, Welch and colleagues pointed out that diagnoses for thyroid cancer have "skyrocketed" despite stable mortality. Since 1992, there have been more than 200,000 excess thyroid cancer diagnoses among young adults, while the number of deaths has basically been unchanged.
They described this as "a classic signature of overdiagnosis."
Kidney cancer diagnoses have also surged despite falling mortality, which likely reflected incidental detection through increased use of abdominal imaging, the authors said.
Overdiagnosis in both cancers is well documented, they added.
Welch and colleagues posited that an alternative explanation for the rising incidence rates and stable mortality is the increasing effectiveness of treatments over the past several decades. However, "for these opposing forces to align so precisely, i.e., treatment advances perfectly counterbalancing the increase in disease (not too fast, or mortality would fall; not too slow, or mortality would rise), seems implausible," they argued.
A more "nuanced" approach to early detection is needed, they suggested. "The challenge is to refine diagnosis to only detect and treat the cancers that truly matter."
In an accompanying editor's note, Ilana B. Richman, MD, MHS, and Cary P. Gross, MD, both of the Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, noted that the findings by Welch and colleagues have "important implications," including the fact that cancer overdiagnosis is not exclusively a function of age and competing mortality, and that cancer is heterogeneous, as is the risk of overdiagnosis.
These findings also underscore the importance of choosing meaningful indicators for cancer control and prevention efforts.
"The goal of cancer screening and treatment should not be merely to detect cancer, but rather to reduce its morbidity and, ultimately, mortality," they wrote. "Focusing on changes in mortality, therefore, is a more reliable way to identify policy priorities, to prioritize areas for future study, and to justify changes in practice."
Mike Bassett is a staff writer focusing on oncology and hematology. He is based in Massachusetts.
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It’s not the multiple hundreds of atmospheric nuclear test in the 1950s and 60s... It’s not the chemically created pampers kids have been wearing since the 1970s, and it’s not the Covid shot...
It’s better screening... Ah huh... If you say so.
My youngest son was diagnosed with Stage 3 colon cancer in 2019 at the age of 48. The surgeon told him he’d wished he’d come to see him 10 years earlier, but then they weren’t doing colonoscopies on 38 year olds at that time. After two resections, the removal of approximately 70 lymph nodes and 6 months of chemo, he is six years cancer free.
You could run the Covid-19 PCR test to 400 cycles, and if Covid-19 wasn’t there in the original sample, it won’t appear in the reaction regardless of how many cycles you carry it out.
The misunderstanding of the PCR process is profound.
Think of it this way: You put a piece of paper on a copier and make a copy. You then copy the paper and its copy. Then you copy the paper and the three copies. Repeat 20-40 times.
If the original paper was blank, how many times do you need to copy it to get (for example) a meaningful paragraph? You might end up with copies with “noise” on them, but you won’t get a neatly printed paragraph no matter how many copies you make. You’ll only see a neatly printed paragraph on the copies if it existed on the original paper.
That’s how PCR works.
Remember all the "asymptomatic" COVID-1984 cases that were used to shut down all churches and schools but not Walmart or Antifa riots?
Those were deliberately generated false-positives.
Never let a crisis go to waste, and if there is no crisis to not let go to waste, generate one with PCR.
If you ran it for 400 cylces the reagent would be so diluted and full of garbage that you could find anything you wanted.
“Researchers suggest increase does not necessarily reflect a rise in clinically meaningful cancers”
What a bunch of gobbledygook!
https://covid19.onedaymd.com/2025/10/all-covid-vaccines-increase-cancer-risk.html
I'm not sure I buy the "overdiagnosis" claim. What, exactly, does that mean? If a person has cancer confirmed by advanced testing (e.g. biopsy) once the screening showed there might be a problem, they have cancer. How is that "overdiagnosis"? If a person comes up positive during a screening, but further testing shows no cancer, then that is not a cancer diagnosis.
When I see the word "overdiagnosis" used, I get the impression that those using the word are trying to cut costs by reducing screening, because reduced screening means reduced advanced testing and fewer false positives from screening. I think the calculation is that reducing the number of false positives saves more money than it costs to treat an advanced cancer.
And there is information missing here. What I would expect to see if cancers are being diagnosed earlier is a drop in cancers that are diagnosed later, assuming that the rate of developing cancer is stable over time. The article said nothing about the rate of diagnosis of later stage cancers. It only said that the death rate is unchanged or has dropped. An unchanged or falling death rate is not surprising if more cancers are caught earlier. People don't die of early stage cancer, but of late stage cancer.
The information given is not adequate to really make any conclusions about cancer diagnoses.
The test is run in a closed tube. You can't dilute a reagent mixture in a closed tube. Regardless of how many cycles you run the reaction, the contents of the tube do not change. How the contents are arranged may change--a mixture of loose nucleotides can be changed into a string of connected nucleotides in a positive reaction, but the overall content of salts, nucleotides, enzyme, and water doesn't change. It can't. The tube is sealed.
To use current vernacular: tell me you've never done PCR without telling me you've never done PCR.
No, a false positive cannot be deliberately generated. Since PCR samples are run next to negative and positive controls, if the reagent mixture gets contaminated such that the reaction shows a positive when the target nucleic acid is not present, the negative control will also show a positive result. Once that happens, the entire PCR assay is discarded, the area where the PCR reactions are mixed is cleaned and the assay is repeated with all new tubes and pipettes on clean equipment. The PCR assay would also be repeated if the positive control came up negative.
Like I said, try to learn something about how PCR is conducted.
A PCR test run for 400 cycles would not be valid. The typical maximum number of cycles is around 40 to 45, as running excessive cycles beyond that point leads to inaccurate and unreliable results.
A recipe for generating false positives when desired. How quaint.
So you have no interest in determining whether a something detected at 40 cycles is actually a health threat, you just want to mindle$$ly crank out numbers and pretend you have discovered a deadly asymptomatic infection?
Bkmk
You don’t actually want to understand, do you?
The purpose of running positive and negative controls is to ensure that the reagents are good (they can go bad) and that there is no contamination of the reagents. This is not “a recipe for generating false positives.” It is a safeguard against mistakes. If those controls do not behave as expected, that entire run is thrown away, even if it is a 384 well PCR plate with 126 samples, a negative, and a positive control all run in triplicate. It doesn’t matter what the samples look like if the controls don’t work.
In a properly run PCR, the negative control will be blank, the positive control will be positive, and the results of the samples will be variable, with some positive and some negative.
Your little Google search didn’t tell you very much, did it? “Inaccurate and unreliable results” are not the same as positive results or false positives. Those “inaccurate and unreliable” results are much like the random marks that might appear on paper if you started photocopying a blank page and repeatedly photocopying the copies, the copies of copies, etc., over and over. You would never mistake those random marks for actual text.
BTW, have you tried photocopying a blank piece of paper repeatedly until your copies show clear and legible text? If so, how long did it take before text spontaneously appeared?
Carry on grinding out your deadly “asymptomatic” pathogenic results.
What PCR can tell you is whether or not there is viral nucleic acid (RNA) present. What it cannot tell you is whether that viral RNA is present because of an early pre-symptomatic infection, because of an active symptomatic infection, or because there is still viral RNA present weeks or months after an infection.
Please stop demonstrating how little you know about PCR or the diagnosis of infectious disease. Please.
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