BOWEL TROUBLE

Colorectal Cancer Rates Are Inexplicably Rising in Young People: Study

Another alarming finding: 60 percent of patients are being diagnosed in the advanced stages, up from 52 percent around two decades ago.

More young people are being diagnosed with colorectal cancer, often in the advanced stages of the disease, according to a new report. About 20 percent of new colorectal cancer diagnoses were in patients under 55 in 2019, compared with 11 percent in 1995, the American Cancer Society said Wednesday. Similarly, in 2019, 60 percent of all colorectal cases among all patients were diagnosed in the dangerous stages of the disease, up from 52 percent in the mid-2000s, the ACS study said. The reasons for this “worrisome trend,” as Paul Oberstein, a medical oncologist at the NYU Langone Perlmutter Cancer Center who was not involved in the research, put it to The Washington Post, are unknown. “I see so many young patients who live really healthy lifestyles that get diagnosed with metastatic colon cancer,” Kimmie Ng, director of the Young-Onset Colorectal Cancer Center at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, told The Wall Street Journal. “There are other environmental exposures that need to be looked at.” Colorectal cancer is the third most commonly diagnosed cancer in both men and women in the United States, and the second-deadliest globally after lung cancer.