According to a new study from Harvard Medical School’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, early onset cancers have significantly increased globally.
was conducted in order to try and understand why this is the case among younger adults. According to the researchers, it possibly has to do with the change in people’s lifestyles, diets, weights, environmental exposures and bacteria over the last few decades.
Cohn said there are a lot of factors behind this, including what the study described as changes in human life over decades. But he also said it may have to do with the processes of early detection and screening. “As we’re seeing lifestyle leading to changes in the diagnosis of cancer at an earlier age," Cohn said,"we can change those lifestyle choices that we make, or at least try to modify them, we hopefully put cancer back into later stages compared to where they were decades and decades ago.”Dover said she felt she was “pretty healthy” before she was diagnosed with leukemia.
Dover has since been going in for checkups on her cancer status every three months, and will continue to do so for a couple more years. Though she is not out of the woods yet, Dover said she still considers herself a cancer survivor. “I was able to FaceTime him every morning. Dad would set the phone up in front of him while he ate his breakfast,” Dover said. “It was like I was there, I talked to him his whole way to school.”
But even when things returned to normal after her treatment, she felt that everyone around her had completely moved on in their stages of life.