[timr]

Go look at the graphs again. The “split by age” graph shows an increase in diagnosis of ~60%, but an increase in mortality of only ~10%. That’s not a small difference, and we aren’t that good at curing colon cancer.

GP’s hypothesis is one of the leading explanations for this trend, but of course gets rejected by advocates for colonoscopy. Taking into account error bars on these numbers (which author doesn’t show, because they are inconvenient to the argument being made), it seems at least somewhat likely that the explanation for the rise in younger cases is due to increased screening, with the “increased” mortality either being statistical noise, or misattribution of deaths that also would have occurred in earlier periods.