PSA for anyone reading this: Colorectal cancer for younger people seems to be on the rise. They don't seem to know why. My father had colon cancer and was not expected to survive it. I think he was 69 when he was finally diagnosed. He had put off seeing a doctor because he thought it was "just old age" and it was quite advanced by the time he was diagnosed. He did survive it and died, iirc, just short of his 89th or…
Oh we know why! It's just not acceptable to talk about it: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3311490/ Asking people to take responsibility for this one simple thing is taboo. (I have a Colonoscopy just last week as part of a routine exam at my age. The procedure really isn't that bad. A couple hours on the toilet during the prep, and that's about the worst of it).
> “The honest truth is nobody knows 100 percent why there is an increase,” said Dr. Mohamed E. Salem, an assistant professor at Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center at Georgetown University. He said that he is older than about 60 percent of his patients — and he is 42. “It’s hard to blame it on obesity alone. We suspect there is also something else going on.”
The weird thing is that the sharpest increase is among young whites, and it doesn't seem to be entirely correlated with obesity.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/28/well/live/colon-and-recta...
[2] http://www.webmd.com/news/20170808/colorectal-cancer-death-r...