Over the past 10 years, rates of colorectal cancer among 25 to 49 year olds have increased in 24 different countries, including the UK, US, France, Australia, Canada, Norway and Argentina.
The investigation’s early findings, presented by an international team at the Union for International Cancer Control (UICC) congress in Geneva in September 2024, were as eye-catching as they are concerning.
The researchers, from the American Cancer Society (ACS) and the World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) International Agency for Research on Cancer, surveyed data from 50 countries to understand the trend. In 14 of these countries, the rising trend was only seen in younger adults, with older adult rates remaining stable.
Based on epidemiological investigations, it seems that this trend first began in the 1990s. One study found that the global incidence of early-onset cancer had increased by 79% between 1990 and 2019, with the number of cancer-related deaths in younger people rising by 29%. Another report in The Lancet Public Health described how cancer incidence rates in the US have steadily risen between the generations across 17 different cancers, particularly in Generation Xers and Millennials.
Recently I went to Seattle’s children’s museum and when it was about to close I found my self staring at the cosmic particle fog tank. It’s a tank that has low temperature evaporated alcohol in it which creates wisps of fog if highly energetic particles pass thru it. Well I didn’t know what it was until I started noticing the wisps and remembering a YouTube video in the device. It was like a wisp every 10 seconds. Suddenly this family passed by and the little 3 or 4 year old kid approaches the box to see what was in it. The thing lit up like a freaking Christmas tree. Like 10 wisps per second as soon as the kid put his hands on the side of the glass. I looked at him thinking, you don’t know, just live out your life in happiness kid.
That’s wild. Wonder why child was extra radioactive
I was totally bewildered. I should have run to the parents to show them. It was just crazy. Maybe they gave him a hammer and a bunch of smoke detectors the day before.
possibly leukemia and what you were seeing is the effects of treatment…
fuck all cancer.
Oh yeah, what if he had cancer treatment recently! That could have been? Or tracer fluid for MRI.
would be an injectable radiation therapy or a radiotracer for a PET or SPECT scan. afaik radioactive tracers aren’t used in MRI or regular CT scanning
A radioactive tracer can be used in a PET/MRI scan, or a gadolinium-based contrast medium used in an MRI scan. But I think you’re right about MRI not actually requiring a tracer.
MRI sometimes uses a non-radioactive contrast depending on what you’re trying to get images of. MRI is probably the safest imaging modality, but it’s very expensive, kind of difficult sometimes due to how long it takes, and isn’t useful for every kind of imaging that needs to be done.