It’s not just Dwyane Wade, James Van Der Beek, and Kate Middleton; younger and younger people are getting cancer more and more. Vox’s Dylan Scott lays out what we know, and Kate Zickel explains how she survived cancer with hope intact. This episode was produced by Victoria Chamberlin, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Andrea Kristinsdottir, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members NBA Hall of Famer Dwyane Wade speaking about his cancer diagnosis on the Today Show. Photo by Nathan Congleton/NBC via Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is causing more young people to get cancer?
What do James Van Der Beek, Dwayne Wade, and Kate Middleton have in common? They're all youngish people who have been diagnosed with cancer. And it's not just famous people. Younger and younger people are getting cancer more and more. That's fact. So we here at Today Explained wanted to figure out why and figure out how people are dealing with this.
So we sent out our producer, Victoria Chamberlain, to a meetup for young adults with cancer. Victoria, where'd you go?
I didn't go anywhere, Sean. You didn't go anywhere. You failed. The pandemic changed everything, including cancer support groups. So there's one that used to happen in person. And then it shifted to Zoom so that more people from around the country could go and people who are immune compromised because they have cancer.
OK, so you hit up a Zoom.
I hit up a Zoom with a whole bunch of 30 to 40 year olds who are in the thick of cancer diagnosis and survivorship.
OK, what Victoria learned coming up on Today Explained.
Megan Rapinoe here. This week on A Touch More, we are launching our much-anticipated book club, and we're doing it with Abby Wambach and Glennon Doyle, who will introduce their upcoming book, We Can Do Hard Things, Answers to Life's 20 Questions. Plus, we've got some fun and important updates from The W and the NWSL, and of course, we've got a new Are You a Megan or Are You a Sue?
Check out the latest episode of A Touch More wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube.
Today Explained, Sean Romsverm here with Victoria Chamberlain. Victoria, you go to a cancer meetup from the comfort of your own home. It's a Zoom. Who is organizing this thing?
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Chapter 2: How do young adults with cancer find support during the pandemic?
And if I want to go out and, like, meet people and date people, I have had a unilateral mastectomy. And when I show up, I have to both be physically naked and emotionally naked.
But there was also this element of surprise. Like, even though you're hearing tons of news stories out there about millennials getting cancer, you mentioned a couple of them before. We've got Princess Kate and Chadwick Boseman getting
It's still super shocking to be sitting there and receive that diagnosis and then to hear that other people you know or maybe people that you don't know are young and getting cancer.
One of the most frustrating comments that I would hear people say is, oh, you're so young. And to me, that's it's frustrating because it's like cancer does not care. Cancer does not care what age you are. It does not care what your life was like, what dreams you had, what hopes, what thing you were about to do. It does not care. It just comes in and it interrupts and it just intersects.
You always think, oh, it won't be me. It can't be me. And I think that's the biggest thing that this data that's out there has to be telling us and our peers is that we can no longer just assume it can't be me.
And we need our healthcare system also to be that messenger and to step up because no one had ever said to me, even being the daughter of a breast cancer survivor and with a father fighting cancer, you are at risk.
This is exactly what we wanted to focus on today, and this is exactly why we reached out to our colleague, Dylan Scott, because we wanted someone who's written about this to just tell us that we're not just imagining things, right? That... It feels like way more millennials and younger people in their 30s and 40s are getting cancer.
Yes, Sean, as a millennial who is also a hypochondriac, I regret to inform you that younger people, people under 55, which is usually the definition of an early onset cancer case. are in fact getting cancer more often. There's a little couple of ways to slice it.
The Wall Street Journal ran an analysis last year of National Cancer Institute data, and the way they put it was one in five new colorectal cancer patients in the U.S. is under 55, which is twice the rate. that we saw in 1995. There was another study that found that, I think it was between 1990 and 2019, the rates overall of cancer among younger people had increased by 80%.
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