Colon Cancer Is Rising In Young People: What to Know About Causes and Symptoms

Marisa Peters had been experiencing symptoms for years: blood on her toilet paper after going to the bathroom, changes in her stool and difficulty controlling the urge to poop. But she was in her 30s, healthy and physically active. She did not have any abdominal pain, and doctors dismissed the symptoms as hemorrhoids, or normal postpartum changes after the birth of her first son. When Ms. Peters finally visited a gastroenterologist in 2021, after having her third child and experiencing worsening bleeding from her rectum along with changes in her stool consistency, an urgent colonoscopy confirmed that she had colorectal cancer.

It had been four or five years since her symptoms had first emerged. Yet “I did not expect that cancer was going to be what they found,” Ms. Peters said.

A report published by the American Cancer Society in January suggests that rates of colorectal cancer are rising rapidly among people in their 20s, 30s and 40s — even as incidence is declining in people over the age of 65.

“It’s unfortunately becoming a bigger problem every year,” said Dr. Michael Cecchini, a co-director of the colorectal program in the Center for Gastrointestinal Cancers and a medical oncologist at Yale Cancer Center. He added that early-onset colorectal cancers have been increasing by about 2 percent per year since the mid-1990s. This increase has moved colorectal cancer up to being the top cause of cancer deaths in men under the age of 50 and the second-leading cause of cancer deaths in women under 50 in the United States.

In fact, experts are noticing a rise in early-onset colorectal cancers around the world — a trend that they are racing to explain.

Why is colorectal cancer increasing among young people?

Colon and rectal cancers share many similarities and are typically lumped into one category, called colorectal cancer. Studies, however, show that the increase in diagnoses is mainly driven by a rise in rectal cancers and cancers found in the left, or distal, side of the colon, near the rectum. “That maybe provides an important clue for understanding what might be going on,” said Caitlin Murphy, an associate professor and cancer researcher at UTHealth Houston.

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