The Mark Foundation for Cancer Research shared on LinkedIn:
“In The Washington Post, Daniel Wu and Chris H. have laid out a hard reality:
25 years after 9/11, cancer claims among survivors are rising fast. Around half of the 54,000 survivors in the World Trade Center Health Program are now getting treatment for cancer, up from 35% five years ago.
Data from the program points to a few distinct trends:
- A disproportionately high percentage of survivors with lung cancer are women who have never smoked
- Breast cancer is appearing roughly four years earlier than the national average, and often with more aggressive tumors.
- Survivors are presenting with a wide variety of tumors, not just the respiratory issues that many clinicians expected.
The timing makes sense biologically. Tumors can take 20 to 40 years to surface after toxic exposure, but they also track closely with natural aging.
When tissue loses its ability to repair DNA and regulate inflammation, long-ago cell damage can turn into malignancies.
This overlap between environmental factors, biological aging, and cancer is significant, and something The Mark Foundation for Cancer Research and its Samuel Waxman Institute for Aging and Cancer are focusing on closely.
If we want to catch aggressive cancers sooner, we have to understand the interplay between tissue damage, natural aging, and tumor development.
The clearest takeaway from the data is the value of routine monitoring and early detection. Enrolled survivors who had regular screenings had 34% lower cancer mortality than similar patients outside the program.
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