Volume 9 - Article 8 | Pages 163–196  

Individual Aging and Cancer Risk: How are They Related?

By Svetlana Ukraintseva, Anatoli Yashin

Abstract

When individuals get older, the risk of many chronic diseases increases. This increase is in agreement with common theories of aging, such as mutation accumulation, wear and tear, antagonistic pleiotropy, etc. Surprisingly, however, the risk of some chronic conditions (e.g. asthma, arterial hypertension) declines in the old. The cancer incidence rate also declines at old ages after a steep increase during adult life. It contrasts with the continuing increase in total mortality that is often referred to as the aging process. Which forces contribute to a decline in cancer risk in the old?
In this paper we review evidence from experimental biology, illustrating the ambivalent role of individual aging in cancer risk, in particular in forming non-monotonic age-patterns of cancer incidence rate. We show that age-associated changes in the organism may contribute not only to the rise, but also to the deceleration and the decline in cancer risk at old ages.

Author's Affiliation

Other articles by the same author/authors in Demographic Research

Decline in Human Cancer Incidence Rates at Old Ages: Age-Period-Cohort Considerations
Volume 12 - Article 11

Mathematical Models for Human Cancer Incidence Rates
Volume 12 - Article 10

Two proofs of a recent formula by Griffith Feeney
Volume 14 - Article 3

Most recent similar articles in Demographic Research

Ageing and diversity: Inequalities in longevity and health in low-mortality countries
Volume 50 - Article 12    | Keywords: aging, health, lifespan inequality, longevity, old-age threshold, regional differences, socioeconomic status

Frailty at death: An examination of multiple causes of death in four low mortality countries in 2017
Volume 49 - Article 2    | Keywords: aging, causes of mortality, mortality, multiple causes of death

World population aging as a function of period demographic conditions
Volume 48 - Article 13    | Keywords: aging, demographic transition, population

Migrating to a new country in late life: A review of the literature on international retirement migration
Volume 48 - Article 9    | Keywords: aging, internal migration, retirement, transnationalism

Coping with ageing: An historical longitudinal study of internal return migrations later in life in the Netherlands
Volume 46 - Article 27    | Keywords: aging, event history analysis, life course, migrations, sequence analysis, trajectories