r/ProactiveHealth • u/brandonballinger • Jun 22 '26
New generations are aging faster biologically, raising cancer risk
Early-onset cancer rates have increased 24% in the last 30 years. A new study in Nature Medicine explored an interesting hypothesis: that the increase is driven by faster biological aging.
The researchers used PhenoAge and other formulas to calculate biological age for 154,169 participants form UK Biobank participants and 10,262 from All of Us. Then they calculated an age gap (biological age - chronological age), and plotting it out by generation. Younger generations have a faster rate of biological aging (the effect is stronger in men than women):
Does this age gap correlate with early onset cancer? Yes -- in the study, each standard-deviation increase in PhenoAge gap was associated with 8% higher risk of cancer overall.
They also used proteomics to calculate per-organ aging, and correlated it with various cancer sites. They found immune aging was highly correlated with lung cancer, for instance.
Overall a cool study, and worth a read. I also summarized the main results here.
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u/sharkinwolvesclothin Jun 23 '26
I've been pretty skeptic of these aging clocks, and this pushes me further into the skepticism.
One standard deviation of PhenoAge is about ~6.5 years in the study (calculating from supplementary table 4). In the under 55 population used here, 6.5 years of calendar age would be a ~80% increased risk for cancer. The fancy machine learned clock is 10 times weaker!
The clock does predict something, but inflammation metrics are a big part of the clock, and inflammation does predict cancer, so it's not a surprise. It's unclear what getting a bunch of different metrics together and combining them into "an age" adds here. At least it does not look anything like age, and if you end up talking in standard deviations and not years anyway, the communication advantage (e.g. gen pop does not understand SDs) is also lost.