Accelerated aging and young-onset cancer risk!-are stressors of the PELICan hypothesis the missing link?

At the 2024 Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research, researchers from Washington University in St. Louis (1) postulated a hypothesis that an increase in biological age reflective of accelerated aging could play a role in early-onset (cancers occurring in adults below the age of 55 years) carcinogenesis. They examined data from 148,724 individuals within the U.K. Biobank database. Each person’s biological age was calculated using the following biomarkers, including red cell distribution width, mean corpuscular volume, white blood cell count, lymphocyte proportion, blood: albumin, serum alkaline phosphatase, serum C-reactive protein, serum creatinine and serum glucose. They defined accelerated aging to be present when the person’s biological age exceeded their chronological age.