• Question: Is there any specific age that you can get cancer or can you get it any age?

    Asked by barlow2 to Amar, Ana, Andrea, Leah, Matt on 11 Mar 2014.
    • Photo: Anastasia Wass

      Anastasia Wass answered on 11 Mar 2014:

      You can develop cancer at any age but the older you get the more your risk increases.
      This is because your body gets worse at stopping cancer developing the older it gets.
      Some cancers are more common in children or teenagers. Especially if the child has inherited a defective gene as this means less mutations are needed for cancer to occur.

    • Photo: Andrea Hanvey

      Andrea Hanvey answered on 11 Mar 2014:

      You can develop cancer at any age and it should not be thought of as a disease that affects only the elderly. However some cancers are common in particular age groups, for instance retinoblastomas affect children under the age of 5. Hodgkins lymphoma is common in young men and women between the ages of 20 and 30. Breast cancer that is inherited via the BRAC genes usually presents in women under the age of 40.

    • Photo: Leah Fitzsimmons

      Leah Fitzsimmons answered on 12 Mar 2014:

      The risk of developing cancer increases steadily the older you get. More than 1 in 3 people who are diagnosed with cancer each year are over 75 years old, whereas only 1 in every 100 people diagnosed with cancer are under 25.

      There is more information about cancer and aging on the Cancer Research UK website:
      http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/cancer-info/cancerstats/incidence/age/

    • Photo: Matthew Lam

      Matthew Lam answered on 12 Mar 2014:

      As the others have said – you can get cancer at any age and there are forms of brain cancer and blood cancer which are more likely to occur in children.

      Generally speaking we say that cancer is an ageing disease so the older you get the more likely you are to get cancer. This is because the cells in your body get worn down as you get old and are more likely to become mutated into cancerous cells. This is why as we all live longer we expect the number of people with cancer to go up.

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