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.
I have an ultra-runner friend who just got diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer. Absolutely devastating. He had a colonoscopy just a few years ago. His only symptom was not feeling well after a long race.
I wonder if it's due to diet. Endurance athletes love their simple carbs, highly processed gels. I've seen plenty of cyclists taking gummy bears on rides for fuel, or a concoction that is effectively sugar water to drink
The study referenced is really light on details and they don't say if they controlled for that
I stopped after the 4th click, I found it irritating to have to click to get 1 or 2 sentences at a time. This would have been just fine as a short article, making it interactive annoyed me more than the revealed content informed.
Something I've never seen in these analyses is drinking. Millennials are heavy drinkers. Both craft brews and cocktails were defining generational traits. Not everyone is a drinker but it appears they are heavy drinkers compared to other generations.
The theory behind the ultra marathoners is that extreme distance running disrupts the epithelial layer and microbiome in the gut. Wouldn't drinking have similar effects?
> Compared to non-/occasional drinking (≤1 g/day), light/moderate drinking (up to 2 drinks/day) was associated with a decreased risk of CRC (OR: 0.92, 95% CI: 0.88–0.98, p=0.005), heavy drinking (2–3 drinks/day) was not significantly associated with CRC risk (OR: 1.11, 95% CI: 0.99–1.24, p=0.08), and very heavy drinking (more than 3 drinks/day) was associated with a significant increased risk (OR: 1.25, 95% CI: 1.11–1.40, p<0.001)... These results provide further evidence that there is a J-shaped association between alcohol consumption and CRC risk.
I guess these sites don't bring up drinking because except for very heavy drinking the data says it's not a factor.
My layman's thoughts are it has something to do with young people spending way too much time on the toilet sitting doomscrolling on their phones. (also yes to microplastics and endocrine disruptiors)
Also, hope that bidets may help with it in some way? Bidets supposedly reduce hemorrhoids.
I’m in my early 30s and am starting to think about getting a screening. Problem is, it’s not trivial to do. You have to really upsell your doctor to get one so early, even though it’s a relatively benign procedure.
There is a noninvasive testing method called Shield but it is way too flawed to be reliable (with poor positive rates for malignant tumors)
> I’m in my early 30s and am starting to think about getting a screening.
This is a pretty stupid thing to do unless you've had some sort of symptom or family history. Your protection from illness due to screening is statistical, and jumping out of the calculated recommendation just makes it more likely to hurt you (false positives, false negatives, injuries from the procedure) than to benefit you.
Desperately trying to fabricate a reason is just intentionally trying to hurt yourself.
I'm not against colonoscopies (is anyone?) and I personally had my first one early because of an odd pain. Turned out to be unrelated.
edit: the neurotic desperation for disease screening that I see in a lot of people bothers me a lot because it's this odd fetishization of medical science combined with the active subversion of it. For me it's a weird insistence that all tests are good but that the math behind them is not.
I've decided to invest $2000/year and get an MRI scan every year. My first one, the baseline, showed nothing remarkable, thank God. I'm scheduled for my second one in a few weeks, I want to be able to catch anything weird very early on. I think it's worth it despite what all the know-it-alls say.
It's rare to see a website that fails to display anything without JS being enabled that also has such nice looking code. I'm both disappointed and impressed! Reading between the script tags was enough to get the idea at least
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 previously not have been diagnosed early, but only late when they developed symtpoms, by which time they hit 50, would have counted as an incidence or a likely fatality, among the 50+ data. But if that same individual had been caught at 45, they would have counted as an incidence against int he under-50 cohort.
Earlier, better and more available screening alone will shift the data this way.
Excellent content. The delivery mechanism of the site cited is very polarizing! At the very least it’s generated a lot of opinions. If I think of the target audience used to TikTok engagements it makes a lot of sense. It’s swipey influenced and interactive. It breaks the back button oh well we have browser tabs right?
The web is best for me when experimental UX like this is tried out.
I really didn't mind the prep experience. I can't say it was pleasant, but not a big deal. For me the worst part is the risk of perforation: it's rare but adds risk to the procedure.
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 factor, for example.
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.
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.)
Nonsense. There are many ways to get free or reduced price medical care in the US, especially if you are poor. Your doctor will have resources to help you if needed.
You can also rack up huge medical debt and then not pay it. The hospital will sell your debt to bill collectors who will call you for a while, and eventually sue you. At that point you can offer to settle for pennies on the dollar, or you might lose the lawsuit and have to declare bankruptcy which would mean you have negative credit for a few years.
Obviously it will be a difficult time, and hopefully you have something else, but they won't just let you die because you can't afford it.
It doesn't look like meat consumption was mentioned anywhere.
Frequent consumption of red and processed meat is strongly linked to a higher risk of colorectal cancer, with studies showing a 30% to 40% increased risk for high consumption levels [1]. Processed meat, in particular, raises CRC risk by about 18% for every 50-gram daily portion [2].
Your ultra-endurance athletes might be convinced they need more protein in their diets and are most likely consuming large quantities of meat.
The different processes that damage DNA have sequence preferences for the direct change in the DNA (e.g. G-->C versus G-->T), as well as the sequence around the damage. Smoking causes very very different signatures of DNA damage than, say, damage from UV from being in the sun.
So every cell in our body carries with it a (noisy) history of the mutagenic processes it has been exposed to.
This paper found some differences in these mutational signatures of later colon cancers, and attributed them to colibactin, a mutagen produced by bacteria.
It remains to be seen what percentage of the increase in under-50 colon cancers this would explain, but it's an additional risk factor that didn't make it onto the chart, likely because it's not coming from standard epidemiological analysis, and instead from the world of molecular analysis.
The encouragement is that the rate of "death from colorectal carcinoma" seems to be reduced in studies of screening. This is a 'disease specific' mortality statistic. Most of us don't care why we die, or what is ultimately written upon our death certificates, we would simply rather still be alive! So reduction in "total mortality" would be a more convincing endpoint. If a study of some screening test for a dread disease does NOT show a reduction in the 'total mortality' of the group screened at some clinically reasonable point of time in the future, one could argue that the screening was pointless. Yes, perhaps less people died from the condition being screened for, but if the same number of persons died in the screened -vs- unscreened group, what has been accomplished?
It has been hard, well impossible, to show that screening for colorectal cancer reduces the total or overall death rate. For example, a recent study published in the NEJM in 2022 did find a reduction in persons who died from colorectal carcinoma after screening with colonoscopy. But they did NOT find that the total or overall death rate had decreased!
"The risk of death from any cause was 11.03% in the invited group and 11.04% in the usual-care group (risk ratio, 0.99; 95% CI, 0.96 to 1.04)." N Engl J Med 2022;387:1547-1556 DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa2208375V
When reading 'screening' studies, one usually needs to look very carefully at the article and published data to find this statistic. Sometimes it is not even reported at all, it is simply ignored. It's almost like the authors don't want the fact that the screening program does not reduce one's risk of dying to any measurable degree is ... embarrassing?
This problem is not unique to colorectal cancer screening.
Australia has a national screening program, originally for over-50s but now also open to 45-49yo to request a home test kit. You'll get a kit every two years, and should they find blood in the sample they will then refer you to get a colonoscopy exam.
They should probably extend the eligibility to these younger high-risk groups.
35 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 49.1 ms ] threadThe study referenced is really light on details and they don't say if they controlled for that
The theory behind the ultra marathoners is that extreme distance running disrupts the epithelial layer and microbiome in the gut. Wouldn't drinking have similar effects?
> Compared to non-/occasional drinking (≤1 g/day), light/moderate drinking (up to 2 drinks/day) was associated with a decreased risk of CRC (OR: 0.92, 95% CI: 0.88–0.98, p=0.005), heavy drinking (2–3 drinks/day) was not significantly associated with CRC risk (OR: 1.11, 95% CI: 0.99–1.24, p=0.08), and very heavy drinking (more than 3 drinks/day) was associated with a significant increased risk (OR: 1.25, 95% CI: 1.11–1.40, p<0.001)... These results provide further evidence that there is a J-shaped association between alcohol consumption and CRC risk.
I guess these sites don't bring up drinking because except for very heavy drinking the data says it's not a factor.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/colorectal-cancer-keeps-risin...
I think a major factor is the increase in microplastics in our diets.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S18777...
Also, hope that bidets may help with it in some way? Bidets supposedly reduce hemorrhoids.
That being said, I wish this was a normal page that scrolled. The click click click just breaks the web.
There is a noninvasive testing method called Shield but it is way too flawed to be reliable (with poor positive rates for malignant tumors)
This is a pretty stupid thing to do unless you've had some sort of symptom or family history. Your protection from illness due to screening is statistical, and jumping out of the calculated recommendation just makes it more likely to hurt you (false positives, false negatives, injuries from the procedure) than to benefit you.
Desperately trying to fabricate a reason is just intentionally trying to hurt yourself.
I'm not against colonoscopies (is anyone?) and I personally had my first one early because of an odd pain. Turned out to be unrelated.
edit: the neurotic desperation for disease screening that I see in a lot of people bothers me a lot because it's this odd fetishization of medical science combined with the active subversion of it. For me it's a weird insistence that all tests are good but that the math behind them is not.
E.g. a 45-year-old with a latent colorectal cancer who would previously not have been diagnosed early, but only late when they developed symtpoms, by which time they hit 50, would have counted as an incidence or a likely fatality, among the 50+ data. But if that same individual had been caught at 45, they would have counted as an incidence against int he under-50 cohort.
Earlier, better and more available screening alone will shift the data this way.
The web is best for me when experimental UX like this is tried out.
Humanity seems to be getting this particular snake in its grip.
In this, I'm in the same boat as millions of other Americans. Positive medical news rarely applies to us.
You can also rack up huge medical debt and then not pay it. The hospital will sell your debt to bill collectors who will call you for a while, and eventually sue you. At that point you can offer to settle for pennies on the dollar, or you might lose the lawsuit and have to declare bankruptcy which would mean you have negative credit for a few years.
Obviously it will be a difficult time, and hopefully you have something else, but they won't just let you die because you can't afford it.
Frequent consumption of red and processed meat is strongly linked to a higher risk of colorectal cancer, with studies showing a 30% to 40% increased risk for high consumption levels [1]. Processed meat, in particular, raises CRC risk by about 18% for every 50-gram daily portion [2].
Your ultra-endurance athletes might be convinced they need more protein in their diets and are most likely consuming large quantities of meat.
1: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10194058/
2: https://www.umassmed.edu/news/news-archives/2015/10/umms-col...
A recent finding from last year looked at the mutational signatures in colon cancer in those under 50:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09025-8
The different processes that damage DNA have sequence preferences for the direct change in the DNA (e.g. G-->C versus G-->T), as well as the sequence around the damage. Smoking causes very very different signatures of DNA damage than, say, damage from UV from being in the sun.
So every cell in our body carries with it a (noisy) history of the mutagenic processes it has been exposed to.
This paper found some differences in these mutational signatures of later colon cancers, and attributed them to colibactin, a mutagen produced by bacteria.
It remains to be seen what percentage of the increase in under-50 colon cancers this would explain, but it's an additional risk factor that didn't make it onto the chart, likely because it's not coming from standard epidemiological analysis, and instead from the world of molecular analysis.
It has been hard, well impossible, to show that screening for colorectal cancer reduces the total or overall death rate. For example, a recent study published in the NEJM in 2022 did find a reduction in persons who died from colorectal carcinoma after screening with colonoscopy. But they did NOT find that the total or overall death rate had decreased!
"The risk of death from any cause was 11.03% in the invited group and 11.04% in the usual-care group (risk ratio, 0.99; 95% CI, 0.96 to 1.04)." N Engl J Med 2022;387:1547-1556 DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa2208375V
When reading 'screening' studies, one usually needs to look very carefully at the article and published data to find this statistic. Sometimes it is not even reported at all, it is simply ignored. It's almost like the authors don't want the fact that the screening program does not reduce one's risk of dying to any measurable degree is ... embarrassing?
This problem is not unique to colorectal cancer screening.
They should probably extend the eligibility to these younger high-risk groups.
https://www.health.gov.au/our-work/national-bowel-cancer-scr...