CANCER INCIDENCE RATE AND AGING

increases exponentially with age (Gompertz law of mortality). At present, this law is still true. Fig. 1 shows the recent data on death rates for specified age groups (taking into account both sexes of all races) that were obtained from the survey of the chances for death in 2006 for the entire population of the United States (these data are from the National Center for Health Statistics, USA [2]). The fact that the mortality increases exponentially with age indicates that the progressive accumulation of diverse adverse changes within the life span (these changes increase the risk of death) is likely to predetermine the rate of aging. As Harman [3] stated, “the rate of aging is low early in life, but rapidly increases with age due to the exponential nature of the process”. Obviously, the aging process depends upon two components of its regulation: 1) intrinsic (i.e., genetic); 2) extrinsic, which includes lifestyle factors and environmental exposures. Advancing age is known as a high risk factor for cancer. The relevance of aging to the risk of overall cancer is likely to be supported by the fact that the cancer risk exponentially increases with age despite the age-specific occurrence of some kinds of cancer