There’s a question I’ve started being asked at work. Given I’m a psychiatrist, it isn’t one I’d ever expected to hear: ‘Do I have cancer?’ A young woman with anxiety wants to know whether the lump on her neck is sinister; she has been watching a great deal of TikTok. A man in his late thirties, in for a routine review, mentions in passing that his sister has been referred for a colonoscopy and wonders whether he should be too. At a dinner party a few weeks ago, a friend leant across halfway through her low-alcohol natural wine and asked me, in a small voice, whether it was true her generation was getting cancer in their thirties.

Yes, I said, perhaps a little too bluntly. She looked rather panicked for the rest of her evening. But it is true, although not quite in the way some in the media have framed it. The current panic is about a ‘Gen Z cancer crisis’, which is, broadly speaking, nonsense. The data says something different yet just as worrying. The generations being hit hardest are, in fact, the very ones now phoning me up in a panic. They are millennials and Gen X: people in their thirties and forties. The generations, in other words, who have done absolutely everything they were told to do. Gen Z, who are even more abstemious than millennials, may yet end up the worst affected of the lot. But cancer in your twenties remains rare, so we won’t know for a decade or two.

Gen Z, even more abstemious than millennials, may yet end up the worst affected of the lot

Gen Z, even more abstemious than millennials, may yet end up the worst affected of the lot

In 2024, researchers at the American Cancer Society published findings in the Lancet Public Health journal that ought to give my dinner party friend pause. Among 23.6 million patients, incidence rates of 17 of 34 cancer types (including breast, pancreatic, gastric, colorectal, kidney and uterine) were climbing through successive generations, each cohort doing worse than the one before.

Some of the figures are gobsmacking. Someone born in 1990 is twice as likely to develop colon cancer and four times as likely to develop rectal cancer as........

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