GoKawiilColorectal cancer is now the leading cause of cancer death in the US for people under 50, according to a new analysis from the American Cancer Society, prompting both experts and those in that age group with the disease to warn others to take certain symptoms seriously.
Becca Lynch, who works in cyber security in Denver, Colorado, was diagnosed with advanced colon cancer last year, when she was just 29. At first, she assumed her symptoms couldn’t be anything serious: “I chalked it up to stress,” she said.
Now, she is careful to describe her symptoms in great detail, not because they’re fun to talk about, but because she doesn’t want other people to miss the signs.
Initially, she was experiencing “pencil thin” bowel movements and having to “go number two much more frequently,” as much as five or six times a day. Eventually, she started seeing thick, dark blood with each movement.
She decided to see a doctor after seeing an Instagram video by Cass Costley, where she talked about how similar symptoms turned out to be colon cancer. Still, Lynch put off a colonoscopy for several months; when she did get it, she was diagnosed with stage 3B colon cancer.
Lynch’s is a “very common story”, says Rebecca Siegel, an epidemiologist and senior director of cancer surveillance research at the American Cancer Society and lead author of the analysis.
Around 3/4 of people under 50 already have advanced colorectal cancer when they’re diagnosed, “because they haven’t been screened through regular colonoscopies, and they don’t take their symptoms seriously, because they think they’re too young”, Siegel said.
Many people assume they have haemorrhoids, because that’s the first search result that comes up when you look up blood in stool. Costley, the woman who inspired Lynch to get checked out and has since passed away from the cancer, told Today that she too thought she probably had haemorrhoids and “ignored it”.
Siegel urges anyone who is experiencing rectal bleeding for more than a couple weeks to see their doctor immediately. For people without symptoms that want to get screened, stool tests like Cologuard and the FIT test are a good way to rule out potential cancer for people who don’t want to get a colonoscopy right away, she added.
For people over age 65 colorectal cancer is “continuing to decline rapidly by more than two percent a year”, Siegel said, whereas for younger people, it’s jumped from the fifth to the first leading cause of cancer death since the 1990s.
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