Interrelations between cancer of hormone-dependent tissues and other major noncommunicable diseases: The age-specific aspect

Abstract

When we speak of major noncommunicable diseases (NCDs), we mean, in the first place, cardiovascular (ischemic heart disease, hypertension) and cerebrovascular (stroke) pathologies, malignant tumors, and chronic nonspecific respiratory (pneumonic) diseases and diabetes mellitus, ascribing to them, respectively, 25–30, 13.7 and 2% of the mortality that world statistics recorded in the early 2010s [91]. Guided by the core of the problem, but not by mortality rates [29], we should also class in the NCD group such diseases as osteoporosis, unipolar depression, and obesity [36]. According to the domestic statistical data on oncology (15, 16, 21) and the cancer registries of the United States [80], summary morbidity due to neoplasms of hormone-dependent tissues make up nearly 35–45% of all cancer-related cases. The last few decades were characterized by pronounced demographic changes and more insistent projections of a growing share of major noncommunicable diseases, including cancer [65, 79]. Therefore, attempts to understand the place of hormone-dependent malignant tumors among other human NCDs and analyze the interrelations between the former and the latter in their age-specific aspect are regarded as a vital task for contemporary oncoendocrinology. Although major human chronic diseases are mainly diagnosed in the second half of life, their hormone-metabolic base begins to form many decades before the clinical manifestations of the related pathological processes and does not always demonstrate an obvious picture of associations with individual diseases in this group. The latter may serve as an explanation for the absence of parallelism in the frequency of these diseases, in particular, in the final stage of ontogenesis.