Colorectal cancer is now the leading cause of cancer-related death among people under 50 in the United States, according to new evidence from the American Cancer Society.
The evidence, published Thursday, Jan. 22 in the Journal of the American Medical Association, showed colorectal cancer jumped from the fifth-leading cancer death in the early 1990s to the first.
"We weren’t expecting colorectal cancer to rise to this level so quickly, but now it is clear that this can no longer be called an old person’s disease," Dr. Ahmedin Jemal, senior author of the study and senior vice president of surveillance, prevention and health services research at the American Cancer Society, said in a news release.
Lung cancer dropped from ranking first to fourth and leukemia dropped from third to fifth, according to the report. And breast cancer remained the second-leading cancer death overall and first in females.
The report used data from the National Center for Health Statistics to analyze more than 1 million people from 1990 through 2023 across 50 U.S. states and the District of Colombia.
