Why are so many young people getting cancer? What the data say

Of the many young people whom Cathy Eng has treated for cancer, the person who stood out the most was a young woman with a 65-year-old's disease.The 16-year-old had flown from China to Texas to receive treatment for a gastrointestinal cancer that typically occurs in older adults.Her parents had sold their house to fund her care, but it was already too late."She had such advanced disease, there was not much that I could do," says Eng, now an oncologist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee.Eng specializes in adult cancers.And although the teenager, who she saw about a decade ago, was Eng's youngest patient, she was hardly the only one to seem too young and healthy for the kind of cancer that she had.Thousands of miles away, in Mumbai, India, surgeon George Barreto had been noticing the same thing.The observations quickly became personal, he says.Friends and family members were also developing improbable forms WHY ARE SO MANY YOUNG PEOPLE GETTING CANCER? WHAT THE DATA SAYClues to a modern mystery could be lurking in information collected generations ago.By