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Why Are More Healthy Young Adults Getting GI Cancer?
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Released: August 20, 2025

John Marshall
John Marshall, MD
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Why Are More Healthy Young Adults Getting GI Cancer?

 

[00:05]

 

John Marshall, MD:
John Marshall for Oncology Unscripted. Big paper coming out of JAMA—it's actually a review article. Really, really smart people and friends up in Boston looked at this. We all see it: this emerging trend of younger and younger people getting all kinds of cancer. This particular paper wasn’t about all kinds of cancer, but we’re clearly seeing it in GI cancers. We don’t really understand what’s going on, but we see it—it’s impacting our clinic. Maybe it was first recognized in the colon cancer clinic, but we’re seeing it in other clinics as well.

 

We have two kinds of schools of thought on why this is happening. On one side, we’ve got this sort of traditional “here’s who gets cancer” list. So, you have a gene, you’ve inherited it, or you have some behavior that increases your risk, or you’re overweight or something, right? You have some known risk factor that we all learned in medical school that’s causing this cancer.

 

Now, if that were true, then our normal 60/40 split of cancers—40% on the right side, 60% on the left side—would hold true in colon cancer. But in fact, most of these young people with colon cancer—up to like 90-something percent—all have rectosigmoid cancers. So, what the heck’s going on? And most of the patients that we see, at least that I see here in Washington, DC, don’t have any of those things on the list that we all memorized.

 

They’re all very fit. They have no real reason to have this—no strong family history and certainly no gene. So, we are looking for novel explanations. The leading one right now has mostly to do with microbiome and understanding what that’s all about. We’re not going to drill down on that today, but we are looking for the explanation as to why.

 

Now, the other piece that goes with this is: if you’re a young person, is your cancer better? Well, it actually doesn’t look that way. If anything, it looks like it might be worse. We know that we fail to diagnose it earlier because it’s not on our radar. If I’m in an urgent care clinic or in an ER or something—or even if I’m a patient with the symptoms—you don’t think to yourself, “Oh, I could have colon cancer,” because you’re 40 years old, and it’s too young to have colon cancer.

 

So, it isn’t a better cancer. But on the flip side, because you’re younger as a patient, doctors tend to be more aggressive. They tend to push treatments harder because young people can take it well. On the flip side of that, they also have much longer to live if we give them some sort of permanent toxicity—say, neuropathy from oxaliplatin.

 

So, it is clearly its own thing. It has its own impact on day-to-day living for these people, because they have to keep working, because they need health insurance here in the United States. They have to tell people about it. So, the impact on their lives is much bigger than, say, if you’re a retired 73-year-old with a good support system.

 

So, that impact is a bit worse. The disease probably is worse. The failure to diagnose is worse. We don’t really know what the biology and the cause is, and more isn’t necessarily better. So, there’s a lot to talk about and think about. Take a look at this paper, see the emerging trends, and share it with your colleagues in other areas of healthcare so that they’re aware of it, too.

 

John Marshall for Oncology Unscripted.

 

[03:51]

 

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.