I know this is kind of a specialized question, but there are lots of smart people here so I thought somebody might have an answer.

People around me often say that "when young people get cancer, it progresses rapidly." The implication I think is that young people are more energetic, and thus the cancers they get are also energetic. I'm sort of wondering if it's true, and if so, why. I have a couple of thoughts about it, and wonder if anybody knows enough to make any comments.

One is that young people do tend to get aggressive types of cancer. I'm thinking of sarcomas and acute leukemias, for example. Whereas older people tend to get carcinomas and chronic leukemias that do not progress as rapidly. But I'm not sure why this would be.

Two hypotheses come to mind.

The first is that the young people who get those aggressive cancers have some genetic susceptibility or something, and would get them anyway, just they happen to get them young.

The second is that somehow young people's immune systems are strong enough to overcome the cancers that older people get, and so only succumb to fairly aggressive cancers in the first place.

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