A lot of researchers studying lifespan believe that there is (at some level) a tradeoff between aging and risk of cancer. The idea is that if you live long enough, you are more or less guaranteed to come down with one sort of cancer or another - there have been so many cell divisions along the way that some of them may well have gone wrong in some way, and so much cellular environmental wear and tear laid in on top of those. Now, it has to be said that not all of these cancerous events will directly lead to mortality; the connection is not so simple. For instance, it’s believed that a number of elderly men die with some sort of slow-moving prostate cancer, but do not die of it (and may not have ever known that anything like that was happening). In such cases, some sort of cardiovascular trouble is more likely to be the proximate cause of death.
But what if we were to find a way to extend the average human lifespan to 120, 150, 200 years?
Accelerated aging may be a cause of increased cancers in people under 55
“For their study, the researchers looked at the data of 148,724 people that was kept in the UK Biobank database”
An increase in cancers among people 55 years old and younger may be related to accelerated aging in recent generations, according to a study presented at a conference earlier this month.
“It’s been known in the aging field for many years now that accelerated aging processes [are] predisposed to cancer,” said James Kirkland, Noaber Foundation professor of aging research at the Mayo Clinic. "
“The study did not identify specific factors that could be contributing to accelerated aging though Cao noted previous research has linked “environmental and lifestyle influences” to potential causes. This universe of factors could include such factors as increased air travel, more exposure to radiation and the presence of tiny “forever chemicals” that have been linked to health problems.”
Maybe microplastics and “forever chemicals” are a bigger threat than we thought. I would think that people in the “Blue Zones” have a much less contaminated diet.