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Overall, the colorectal cancer story is encouraging

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Re: Overall, the colorectal cancer story is encouraging

#41
post #2

Wow, I had no idea there is a 15X increase for endurance athletes. Make me want to dial down the running a bit, which make you wonder where the sweet spot is for distance training.

It's not simply endurance athletes though. It was 2x ultra-marathons >26 miles, or at least 5 marathons completed.

Which is way more than what original hunters and gatherers ever clock. They do move a lot, but not so much, and they alternate their activities a lot too (running, walking, resting, taking entire days off and just guarding their village).

We're not really optimized for this sort of extreme endurance and long-term development of serious pathologies is unsuprising.

Re: Overall, the colorectal cancer story is encouraging

#43
post #34
post #32

How much of the rise do the listed later on (endurance athletes, obesity, sugary drinks, sedentary lifestyle) explain the relative youth rise? After all, some of this was an issue in 2006 as it is in 2026. Does it explain most of the relative rise, or is there a major missing piece / a mystery still to be explained? I doubt the % of endurance athletes changed meaningfully population-wide, to be a major contributing f…

You'd be surprised. COVID-19 fundamentally altered a lot of people's habits. https://www.businessofapps.com/data/strava-statistics/

I had to have a good read of the article and put the content in ChatGPT for further more detailed analysis. I still can’t infer a single thing about how I should be surprised or how people’s habits changed, so feel free to enlighten me!

Re: Overall, the colorectal cancer story is encouraging

#44
Even in Czechia, where the combination of traditional "heavy" food and, probably, some sort of genetic burden (people with Czech ancestry tend to suffer from colorectal cancers even if they live in regions with very different diets) used to make us the record holders, mortality has gone significantly down.

Humanity seems to be getting this particular snake in its grip.

Re: Overall, the colorectal cancer story is encouraging

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Millennials are not the younger generation anymore. That refers to Gen Z and alpha.

It’s more like, millennials got older and started drinking less (as happens), and Gen Z drinks different things like hard seltzer, and also drinks a bit less overall. Plus there were just way too many craft brewers making hoppy ipa to begin with.

Unfortunately, hoppy IPA seems to constitute the majority of the survivors. I have no interest personally in suffering through another hazy sour grapefruit triple ipa, but that seems to be about 90% of craft brewery output these days.

Re: Overall, the colorectal cancer story is encouraging

#46
The graph showing risk factors in age groups 18-49 is interesting - obesity, "sugary drinks (>2/day)", and sedentary lifestyle (>2 hr TV/day) are each about 1.5-2x increase in risk factor. Obesity has roughly doubled over this time period, and people are more sedentary. What I could find about "sugary drinks" seems to indicate it hasn't changed much or even dropped slightly over this time. So obesity/sedentary lifestyle probably explains a lot of the increase (maybe not everything, but probably close; a 50% increase in population incidence, where a ~2x risk factor affected ~50% of the population would explain it.)

Re: Overall, the colorectal cancer story is encouraging

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Millennials are heavy drinkers. That's news to millenials and the graveyard of craft breweries. I thought alcohol consumption is trending off for younger generations.

Not to be rude but, google is free: https://www.google.com/search?q=are+millenials+heavy+drinker...

Well, your first Google result is a blog post that makes my point.

> For example, baby boomers are the generation with the most dramatic increase in harmful alcohol abuse. In contrast, Gen Z prefers the sober lifestyle as they are known to consume alcohol much less than any of their older counterparts, including millennials.

Re: Overall, the colorectal cancer story is encouraging

#48
post #28

If anyone here is up for disrupting the medical field: please come up with a colonoscopy-equivalent with a less awful prep experience.

When I got my second, I had a bidet and it made a huge difference. That and a bit of vaseline to prevent too much irritation. It's an uncomfortable process so taking every win you can saves your sanity

Re: Overall, the colorectal cancer story is encouraging

#49
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Millennials are heavy drinkers. That's news to millenials and the graveyard of craft breweries. I thought alcohol consumption is trending off for younger generations.

I hate to break it to you, but Millennials aren't a younger generation anymore... though I'm not sure they drank any more than the 2-3 generations that proceeded them.

> but Millennials aren't a younger generation anymore...

Not younger than GenX/Baby Boomer? How?

Re: Overall, the colorectal cancer story is encouraging

#50

If you screen more people for the disease, and do it better, such that you reduce the incidences and fatalities in the 50+ cohort, that improvement logically implies that you must be catching incidences in the under 50 cohort. So it's going to skew the numbers. Incidences that would have been tallied in the 50+ cohort, are now counted in the under 50. E.g. a 45-year-old with a latent colorectal cancer who would previ…

This mostly can't explain the fact that mortality is also rising in under 50s. It is true mortality is rising less than incident, and that a small proportion instances of mortality could be deaths related to reasonable risks taken on from treatment side effects (to make up numbers, it makes sense to take a 5% chance of dying from treatment this year over a 80% chance of dying from cancer in 5 years), but this is probably not the whole effect. Something is causing more CRC in people under 50.
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