Modeling early-onset cancer kinetics to study changes in underlying risk, detection, and impact of population screening.

ABSTRACT: Recent studies have reported increases in early-onset cancer cases (diagnosed under age 50) and raised questions about whether the increase is related to earlier diagnosis from non-specific medical tests as reflected by decreasing tumor-size-at-diagnosis (apparent effects) or actual increases in underlying cancer risk (true effects), or both. The classic Multi-Stage Clonal Expansion (MSCE) model assumes cancer detection at the first malignant cell's emergence, although later modifications have included lag-times or stochasticity in detection to represent the delay in tumor detection. Here, we introduce an approach to explicitly incorporate tumor-size-at-diagnosis in the MSCE framework accounting for improvements in cancer detection over time to distinguish between apparent and true increas

SUBMITTER: Mirzaei NM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11643252 | biostudies-literature | 2025 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature