Study Finds Gen Xers And Millennials Are At Higher Risk For These 17 Cancers

You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who’s never worried about their cancer risk ― especially since so many things in our day-to-day lives, from alcohol to the sun’s rays, are known to cause or increase the risk of the disease.

Now, new research conducted by the American Cancer Society has found that millennials and members of Generation X are more likely than older generations to get 17 certain kinds of cancer. The study was published in The Lancet Public Health.

Researchers looked at data from 23,654,000 people ages 25 to 84 who were diagnosed with 34 different kinds of cancer in all. They also looked at data from 7,348,137 people who died from 25 different kinds of cancer in total. The data spanned from Jan. 1, 2000, to Dec. 31, 2019.

Participants were born between 1920 and 1990, and researchers looked at each birth cohort in five-year intervals to consider things like age, environmental factors and lifestyle patterns. Those who were considered Gen X in the study were born between 1965 and 1980, while those classified as millennials were born between 1981 and 1990.

These are the 17 types of cancers that are increasing in Gen Xers and millennials:

• estrogen receptor-positive breast cancer
• ovarian cancer
• cardia gastric (a stomach cancer)
• small intestinal cancer
• liver and intra-hepatic bile duct cancer in women
• non-HPV-associated oral and pharynx cancers in women
• colorectal cancers
• uterine corpus cancer (endometrial cancer)
• kidney and renal pelvis cancer
• pancreatic cancer
• anal cancer in men
• myeloma (which affects the white blood cells)
• non-cardia gastric cancer (a stomach cancer)
• testicular cancer
• leukemia
• Kaposi sarcoma (a cancer of the blood and lymph vessels) in men
• gallbladder and other biliary cancer

Researchers