The kids are growing up so fast these days, but maybe not in the way you think.
A new study of adults suggests that more recent generations are biologically older than earlier generations were at the same age – based on a range of blood markers.
That doesn’t mean Gen Z or Alpha will need walking frames and a bottle of B12 before 30.
But the findings could help explain why certain cancers are on the rise among younger generations, including cancers of the lung, uterus, and gastrointestinal tract.
This worrying trend likely has a complex mix of causes, but teasing out the individual contributors can help scientists and public health experts try to mitigate it.
“If we can identify younger people with the highest cancer risk when they are still healthy, we can focus on prevention and early-detection strategies for the individuals who will benefit most,” says molecular epidemiologist Yin Cao of the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Cancer diagnoses are often associated with aging.
This is because cancer arises when critical genetic damage accumulates in cells, allowing them to grow and divide out of control.
Over time, our bodies accumulate DNA damage from the food we eat, the air we breathe, the sun on our faces, and other habits. Damaged DNA can pass on flawed instructions, causing cell division to go awry.
The longer we live, the more opportunities there are for that damage to accumulate. That is one reason cancer risk rises sharply with age.
In the last decade, however, patient data has revealed an alarming rise in cancer in younger generations. For example, a 2025 study found the Millennial generation was the first to face a higher risk for some cancers than their parents’ generation.
Instead of looking at one single exposure, Cao and her colleagues took a broader approach – biological aging.
This is not how old someone is in years, but how old they appear to be compared to others based on biomarkers, and it can give a demographic-level picture of a population’s health.
The researchers studied three generations of people across two very large cohorts. They studied blood markers from 154,169 adults in the UK Biobank, comparing people born in the early 1950s with those born in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
They also studied health data from 10,262 adults in the US All of Us research program, born either in the 1960s or 1990s.
(Yahoo News)
