Similarities in the Age-Specific Incidence of Colon and Testicular Cancers.

Abstract

Colon cancers are thought to be an inevitable result of aging, while testicular cancers are thought to develop in only a small fraction of men, beginning in utero. These models of carcinogenesis are, in part, based upon age-specific incidence data. The specific incidence for colon cancer appears to monotonically increase with age, while that of testicular cancer increases to a maximum value at about 35 years of age, then declines to nearly zero by the age of 80. We hypothesized that the age-specific incidence for these two cancers is similar; the apparent difference is caused by a longer development time for colon cancer and the lack of age-specific incidence data for people over 84 years of age. Here we show that a single distribution can describe the age-specific incidence of both colon carcinoma and testicular cancer. Furthermore, this distribution predicts that the specific incidence of colon cancer should reach a maximum at about age 90 and then decrease. Data on the incidence of colon carcinoma for women aged 85-99, acquired from SEER and the US Census, is consistent with this prediction. We conclude that the age specific data for testicular cancers and colon cancers is similar, suggesting that the underlying process leading to the development of these two forms of cancer may be similar.