More than 44,000 children in Spain will develop stomach cancer at some point due to a treatable bacterium.

BarcelonaApproximately 15.6 million people worldwide born between 2008 and 2017 will suffer from gastric cancer in their lifetime. In two-thirds of cases, around 12 million, the cause will be bacteria. Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) If current prevention policies are not improved to eliminate this pathogen, which is very common and is transmitted through contact with feces or the consumption of contaminated water. In Spain, of the 4.7 million children currently between eight and seventeen years old, 58,600 diagnoses are expected in adulthood, of which 44,400 will be caused by the bacteria if action is not taken sooner.

These are the conclusions of a study led by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC/WHO) published this Monday in the journal Nature Medicine, in which data on stomach cancer incidence from 185 countries in 2022 have been analyzed and combined with mortality projections for each age cohort based on demographic information from the United Nations.

Stomach cancer is the fifth leading cause of cancer death in the world and is mainly driven by chronic infection with the bacteria H. pylori, which is very common during childhood, disappears in adulthood if treated. The research projects the impact of this type of cancer on children between eight and seventeen years old today throughout their lives. While 58 percent of cases are expected to occur in areas traditionally with a high incidence of gastric cancer, 42 percent would occur in places with a lower incidence "due solely to aging and population growth," Jin Young Park of the IARC/WHO and one of the study's signatories explained to Efe.

However, it's not all bad news, and researchers suggest that there is a solution if more is invested in gastric cancer prevention, especially through programs to detect and treat the bacteria. H. pylori to the entire population. On the contrary, if barriers remain unset, they warn that the burden will remain high in historically high-risk areas: two-thirds of cases will be concentrated in Asia, followed by the Americas and Africa, especially sub-Saharan Africa, where the future burden of the disease could be six times higher than estimated in 2022. ~BK_s 1.2 million gastric cancers if no measures are taken, of which 900,000 would be attributable to this bacteria, while in Western Europe these figures would be 219,600 and 137,397, respectively. Park highlights that in the European Union, prevention will be carried out more actively through the next European Commission project on Gastric Cancer (EC-GaC).

European prevention

The team chose to study children because, in principle, this cancer can still be prevented before it develops. Furthermore, "there is strong evidence" thatH. pylori It is predominantly acquired in childhood, usually before the age of ten, and much earlier in developing countries, the researcher clarifies. Thus, knowing data from young cohorts with projections throughout their lives, Park adds, can help policymakers implement effective interventions as part of a gastric cancer prevention program.

The study cautions that the estimates included in the study are limited by the quality and coverage of the data, particularly in low-resource settings, where cancer registries are incomplete or nonexistent.