Changing Trends in Colorectal Cancer

MARK LEWIS: Hello, my name is Dr. Mark Lewis. I'm a gastrointestinal oncologist. I'm the type of doctor that you never want to meet because if you're in my office that means that you have cancer and in my office specifically it means you have cancer of the gut. Why is this relevant? It's relevant because colon and rectal cancer are affecting people at younger and younger ages.

And then finally, your family history does matter. This is about you, it's also about the genes you inherited. So if you know the people in your family have been getting colorectal cancer around age 50, we would normally subtract about 10 years from that and start screening you even earlier than your peers.

So one of the things that came across these studies was trying to look for demographic clues. OK. So it's one thing to say that you're young. You're under 50, which is traditionally when we screen for colorectal cancer. What can you do beyond that? The group I think is most at risk are women. So in my practice, if you take the average age of all of my patients, the average age of all of my patients with a GI cancer is 68.

So what can you do? Well, A, as I said, you're the expert, the content expert, on your own body. You know what patterns are abnormal for you, and you should raise those to medical attention. B, you should know your family history. There is absolutely a component here of heredity. A colonoscopist, which is generally a gastroenterologist, sometimes a surgeon, very rarely a family medicine doctor, can both see a polyp and remove it. And in doing so, you've interrupted that polyp's disease trajectory. It can't become a cancer if it's removed from your body. So to sum up, know yourself, know your family, and know the age when you should start screening.

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