[PakG1]

If people were to shift away from heart disease, etc, towards cancer over time, the death rate due to cancer would be going up, not holding steady.

I think you're making a poor assumption that if people move away from heart disease, etc, that they would automatically move towards cancer. If such a move happens, there would have to be an external causation factor for that.

Holding steady would indicate to me that either our efforts to combat cancer haven't improved at all, or our efforts to combat cancer are only keeping pace with the increase in cancer rates due to increased toxins in our daily environment or whatever. This talks about death rates due to cancer, not cancer incident rates, so either of these 2 scenarios are plausible (and I'm sure there are other possibilities I'm not able to imagine).

[thisisnotmyname]

In most cases, cancer progression results from cumulative genetic damage, which is strongly linked to aging. See, e.g. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v448/n7155/full/nature0...

[PakG1]

Thank you, I did not know that. That changes the picture quite a bit, though I'd be curious by how much.

This is quite a long article, which I can't afford the time to read right now. Can someone answer the critical question for me, which is: is aging found to be a causative factor in cumulative genetic damage and also cancer, or is it only known to be correlated at this point?