A Quick Public Service Announcement
A busy week—but before March is gone: Happy Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month! If you didn’t realize March was Colorectal Cancer Awareness month, I’m sure you have plenty of company. I forgot, as I usually do, despite being a two-time colon cancer veteran.
The cancers I’ve had are compliments of a genetic mutation, but even in the general population, colorectal cancers are on the rise, and happening at a younger age. Colorectal cancer is now the #1 cause of cancer death for men under 50 and #2 for women under 50. I recently read that if you were born between 1981 and 1996, you have double the risk of colorectal cancer than if you were born in 1950.
Why? No one knows. Micro-plastic particles in our water? The processed food we eat? Lack of exercise? Pick something depressing about modern life and it’s probably a pretty good guess.
But there’s one optimistic thing about colorectal cancers: they can be entirely preventable with screening. Not just early detection but prevention. Virtually all colorectal cancers start as polyps, and polyps can be removed, usually during the screening, without any pain. That’s a huge get out of jail free card
The new recommended age for a first screening is 45. If someone in your immediate family has had colorectal cancer, the recommended age is ten years before their age at diagnosis.
This is a case where an ounce of prevention is definitely worth a pound of cure, so if you or someone you know has been putting it off… stop putting it off.
Bonus read: A longer article I wrote awhile back, diving down a terminology rabbit hole to figure out how we became “cancer survivors” in The Semantics of Survivor.