Dr. Sam Palmer: Thymic Involution as a Cancer Risk
A recent study sheds some light on the reasons why cancer risk increases dramatically with age.
You can also read about it here
The incidence of many cancers increases rapidly as if by power law with age, which supports the theory that cancers are caused by genetic mutations. In the same way, many infectious diseases increase in incidence with age. Combining data from immunology with epidemiology, here we demonstrate that these dramatic increases in age-related incidence can be modelled based on the immune system decline rather than mutation accumulation. The thymus in humans atrophies in childhood, leading to an exponential decline in the production of T cells with a half life of 16 years. We use this data as the basis of a mathematical model that describes disease incidence. Our model is superior to the power-law model, which has the same number and type of parameters for fitting data. It also provides excellent fits when it comes to data on infectious diseases.
Source:
https://www.leafscience.org/thymic-involution-and-cancer-risk/
