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.
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 rare but can happen where long distance running causes ischemic colitis which is where on a long run enough blood is diverted from the large intestine that it damages the intestine long term. It isn't surprising to me that there's higher likelihood of colon cancer given this. It seems like repeated bouts of lower blood for the intestine on long runs has a cumulative impact and damages the colon even if it doesn't cause ischemic colitis.
This theory has been put forward, but it's important to point out that there is no real evidence yet. An alternative theory is diet, which is also the leading theory for increasing incidences in non-athletes. Highly processed, calorie dense foods have been on the watchlist for a while, and ultra endurance athletes have a special need for these to satisfy their caloric requirements. It could also be a combination of these factors or something else that was missed entirely so far.
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.
Interesting, I wasn't aware of that connection either. I was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer, but was identified as 'genetic' and not caused by diet or lifestyle. I used to be a heavy runner too, done a few marathons, and plenty more 10k, 8ks etc. Wonder if that could be a correlation... Treatments have it contained/in maintenance so at least I have that going for me.
Ah, that definitely wasn't offered to me as an option. Glad to see the progress however. It would be nice if there was an alternative test so that I could tell my kids it's not genetic.
It may be the damage of repetitive motion, it may be chemicals released into the bloodstream from endurance athletics. It may be something else. Without knowing the root cause, it's impossible to figure out the "sweet spot"
Could be a lot of things. Lots of long distance runners consume a lot of sugary gels to keep going. Not sure what the typical composition is, but likely lots of glucose and no fibre.
The marathon runners I know also seem to eat tons of junk food, they can get away with it from a weight perspective because a long run will burn it off, but it could have other consequences.
Point being: there's a lot about long distance runners that's quite different from other people.
But the rates of obese people who presumably consume a lot of sugars and carbs are 1/10th the rate of ultra marathon runners. It's scary to think that such conditioned athletes could be subject to this horrible disease.
i saw something recently that pointed to the fact that ultra runners end up with less blood in their guts while running for SO long its leading to cancers and such.
>2x ultra-marathons >26 miles, or at least 5 marathons completed
Yes, and it seems like it's really a 7.5x risk increase. Still pretty spectacular, though!
I really wonder what could cause that. Randomly throwing out possible causes: 1) blood redirected away from gut, 2) overuse of NSAIDS, 3) ultraprocessed foods (gels etc), 4) strange microbiome issues (gels + stress in gut from extreme exertion = altered gut flora?)
The study that found the result is DOI: 10.1200/JCO.2025.43.16_suppl.3619
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.
You shouldn't so offhandedly assume a hunter-gatherer lifestyle couldn't lead to issues like increased risk of CRC, or that activities which lead to increased risk of CRC couldn't be what hunter-gatherers did. Evolution is neither fast nor perfectly precise. Plenty of animal populations have common health problems that simply weren't harmful enough to reproduction to be selected out, much less something rare and late-onset like CRC.
I don't assume anything. From what we know about health of the last surviving hunter-gatherers, they suffer significantly less from "diseases of civilization" when taken in proportion to their settled neighbours. Some of those diseases (such as high blood pressure or diabetes 2nd type) seem to be totally absent in them. Cancers do happen, but not as often.
This pattern is quite old. Already ancient Egyptians suffered from civilizational diseases much more than hunter-gatherers, especially the richer ones (heart attacks, gout, cancer).
I won't bother checking or disputing the accuracy of your factual claims, because it does not matter.
Colorectal cancer is not the same thing as high blood pressure, or type 2 diabetes, or any other cancer that isn't colorectal cancer. Diseases are not a monolith and you cannot assume low risk of some diseases means low risk of others. That is wild guesswork passed off as logic, like measuring the shadow your testicles cast on the wall and announcing it is 24.1 degrees Celsius. Ultra-marathon runners also have low risk of type 2 diabetes!
Do you have specific evidence that modern hunter-gatherers have low rates of colorectal cancer that cannot be explained by survivorship bias, screening, genetic differences, and all other confounders, and that they are representative of historical hunter-gatherers? No? Then you cannot confidently conclude that hunter-gatherers didn't experience elevated rates of CRC.
Absolutely, we may have a depressed rate of CRC where ultramarathoners just get back up to the historical baseline. Who knows, but we don’t know it isn’t that.
"Diseases are not a monolith and you cannot assume low risk of some diseases means low risk of others. That is wild guesswork passed off as logic..."
Diseases are not a monolith, but they do tend to arise and fall in some specific clusters, and that is not "logic", good or bad (too many computer-minded people drag logic into the chaos that is biology), but rather a long-time empirical observation, albeit with some exceptions.
Sigh. Sure, if you had a gun to your head and you knew nothing else, it would be better to guess that a given population (hunter-gatherers) with low rates of some illnesses (T2D, HBP) also had low rates of another illness (CRC) than the reverse. Okay. That's a slightly better-than-chance guess, not anywhere near a solid basis for speculation.
"Anyways, it makes sense that marathoners get CRC because hunter-gatherers probably don't run that much" is bongcloud lalaland tier guesswork.
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)
Not completely. Every once in a while they accidentally puncture the intestine with the probes and that becomes a significant medial problem. It doesn't happen often, but that is still a risk that doctors need to consider. If you are over 50 getting one every 10 years is a good idea, and there is some consideration if younger might be worth it. However so few people get colon cancer under 40 that it isn't worth the risks for most - but if there are other signs of a problem (either family history or symptoms) that changes things and it may be worth it.
I was diagnosed at 35 seven years ago with no history. Getting a colonoscopy never crossed my mind, much less being suggested by my general practitioner.
The trigger for me was blood in my stool. It was the slightest amount but I pursued it because that didn’t seem right. Turns out I had hemorrhoids which brought up something I feel hits others - I was embarrassed.
Fortunately the doctor that performed a banding procedure pushed me to get a colonoscopy purely out of being through and seeing the number of incidences increase at my age range.
I often wonder how much the embarrassment factor comes into play here.
For a screening procedure recommended as a mass conducted preventative measure in otherwise healthy people, harms must be regulated to a better standard than "doesn't happen often". The study that I read of was about serious issue occuring something like one in 120 procedures. It was done at Kaiser. Next time you're enjoying a sausage, take a moment to look at the sausage skins. If I understand correctly, our intestinal walls are quite thin, and even the colon vulnerable.
If you tell your doctor that a parent had polyps removed (say, recently), that will give you your best chance of getting one. Most likely, if you're in an even remotely progressive area, your doc wants you to have one, but their hands are tied by the insurance company. Afaik you dont have to provide any proof of your claim re parental polyps.
> but their hands are tied by the insurance company.
Doctors' ability to prescribe or refer is never restricted by an insurance company. If they think a patient should get whatever healthcare, they are free to say it.
In CA, my doctor can refer me to get a Cologuard. But it's private pay, and they want payment up front since isurance companies don't restrict doctor's ability, only reimbursement.
So they may not be willing (even though they are able) perform procedure/test if they aren't confident they'll get paid.
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.
Lie about family history, but even colonoscopies are not perfect; I just had somebody in my family die of CRC because...
- They had symptoms and wanted a screening, but their PCP repeatedly denied them a referral for like a year because they were "too young".
- They lied about family history after symptoms got worse and got their referral.
- They got the colonoscopy which came back clean, and then symptoms continued to get worse.
- Finally their doctor gave them a referral for an MRI.
Results were stage 4 CRC. The doctor performing the colonoscopy missed the tumor, which was tucked into the sigmoid (the bend in your colon), where he didn't properly inflate because he wasn't taking it very seriously. It had a thumb-tip sized protrusion inside the colon but had gotten huge on the opposite side of the colon wall. They fought it for 8 years after the diagnosis and over 100 rounds of chemo (!!!), were about to get a new procedure at Yale, in which the doctor told them to think of it in terms of "this really may be a complete cure", but it was canceled because of the Big Beautiful Bill.
If you have symptoms (even if you don't), don't let some fuckass Nurse Practitioner tell you no. They don't know shit and they let their egos get in the way when they have to deal with moderately informed patients advocating for themselves. This was preventable and tge medicap system failed them because both the PCP and the doctor performing the colonoscopy were not paying attention to what they were being presented with and saw only their own expectations.
Also...apparently doctors wanted to lower the screening age to like 35, but insurance companies fought it, so it's at 45.
I'm a little removed from the situation, (not my nuclear family) but I believe the statute is up. It's too difficult to litigate in, say, the first two years of your stage 4 diagnosis before the law won't allow a suit.
>Also...apparently doctors wanted to lower the screening age to like 35, but insurance companies fought it, so it's at 45.
On this website, it is frequently opined that because health insurers have a legal minimum medical loss ratio, that health insurers prefer inflated costs so that their medical losses are higher, which means their premiums can be higher, which means their revenue is higher, which means their profit is higher.
I would have thought health insurers would support a lower screening age, especially since it would inflate costs for all insurers so everyone's cut of the now bigger pie gets bigger.
> 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.
From a 'public health' perspective, it makes perfect sense to limit the frequency of screening procedures by age and other broad risk-factors, but that doesn't help at the individual level if you fall on the unlucky side of those statistics.
Most cancers are still very much lethal once they progress to a certain point, and the best treatment we know of is early detection. Many of the cancer screens are harmless or don't add significant risk of death, so it really comes down to money and medical resource availability (also solved with money.)
I don't see much difference in someone paying out-of-pocket for a full-body MRI/colonoscopy vs. them spending way above average on any other item that slightly reduces the risk of dying (how many smoke alarms and fire extinguishers does your home have?)
while it sucks, paying for it out of pocket is probably cheaper if you can't get it covered. In the long run, $1500 as a bridge until your 40s feels cheaper than stage 4 cancer.
$1500? That sounds optimistic. I'm getting an upper endoscopy tomorrow and they've already told me it will be $4K. The equipment is similar, I expect colonoscopy is not cheaper.
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.
Though ostensibly supportive of your claim, the first article says it best a few pages in (surprisingly honest):
"To date, there are no clearly established biological mechanisms that could explain the role of red and processed meat in the process of CRC carcinogenesis."
In other words, we see some small signal in epidemiological studies, and we want to speculate about mechanistic causes, even though this has been tried before to no success.
I would point to the conclusion of the study: "Red and processed meat consumption and its interaction with the gut microbiota are found to be major associated factors. The CRC-associated gut microbiota is made of pro-inflammatory or pro-carcinogenic bacteria and opportunistic pathogenic bacteria that enrich the tumor microenvironment by promoting disease progression."
I would also add that the World Health Organization after evaluating 800 studies classified processed meat as a Group 1 carcinogen back in 2015, indicating a strong causal link to colorectal cancer, placing it in the same risk category as tobacco. [1]
While I linked to a single study in my original comment, I believe the results are more than a small signal.. enough for the WHO to come out and say processed meat does in fact have a causal link to CRC.
Why would meat cause a decrease in incidence for older folks but a higher incidence for younger folks?
Additionally, the risks you quantify for general cancer incidence are at the bottom odds ratios listed at the end for early-onset. Speculating that ultra-endurance athletes eat tons of meat, without any evidence, seems quite misplaced.
From the discussion section, "It is important to note that inadequate intake in the athletes of the present study may carry significant negative health implications. Insufficient consumption of fruits and wholegrains has been linked to the development of chronic diseases, including CVD, cancer, T2D, and hypertension. Additionally, high intake of sodium, saturated fat and discretionary food items are correlated with higher incidence of obesity, T2D, CVD, dementia, and cancer. Paradoxically, despite exceeding the WHO guidelines for physical activity by a substantial margin, these athletes are not meeting dietary recommendations essential for long-term health, highlighting the potential risks posed by these inadequacies."
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.
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.
There's roughly 4 to 5 generations alive at any point and the middle generation is going to be considered both old and young by the generations surrounding it.
You're right. 8 year olds would call you ancient and 80 year olds would call you a baby. Middle age is relative and unless you're over 45 you don't admit to it, and then hold on to it for too long.
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.
This finding is crazy! I wonder how many modern health issues have to do with healthy blood/nutrient flow to tissues, that are basically solved with either mild/moderately amounts of movement and a balanced diet.
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.)
Obviously this is just anecdotal and you could still be correct, but the two celebrities the article cited (Chadwick Boseman and James Van Der Beek) don’t seem to fit that mold.
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.
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.
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!
Food delivery is now an "essential" for more people than it ever was before. Doordash/Uber Eats is how a weirdly large amount of people eat in general.
The rate of increase in childhood obesity went up during covid.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Go look at the graphs again. The “split by age” graph shows an increase in diagnosis of ~60%, but an increase in mortality of only ~10%. That’s not a small difference, and we aren’t that good at curing colon cancer.
GP’s hypothesis is one of the leading explanations for this trend, but of course gets rejected by advocates for colonoscopy. Taking into account error bars on these numbers (which author doesn’t show, because they are inconvenient to the argument being made), it seems at least somewhat likely that the explanation for the rise in younger cases is due to increased screening, with the “increased” mortality either being statistical noise, or misattribution of deaths that also would have occurred in earlier periods.
Does treatment ever speed up death? Given that chemo is super hard on the body I imagine it could? That might just account for your use of “mostly”, though.
It would depend on the treatment. In my case I had neoadjuvant radiation followed by chemo, then surgery, capped off with more chemo to kill any cancer cells that might have tried to make a dash for it. I would assume that while the radiation treatment elevated my risk for future cancers, the greater risk was my 10 hour surgical procedure.
No, it can't explain that; but the rise is very small. On the per 100,000 mortality graphs divided into the age cohorts, the under fifty mortality is almost a flat line. There is something there, but it doesn't seem like a huge alarm.
I think they could do pretty well just not adding bubble gum or whatever nasty flavors the prep has. Sure it'll still be unpleasant and salty, but burping up that nonsense all day really doesn't make it better.
Depending on the doctor some are now recommending getting a tub of miralax, mixing it all into gatorade, and using that for prep instead of the prescription stuff.
Still sucks, but at least it isn't a disgusting flavor, although I haven't had a desire for blue gatorade in the last 3 years
This may be regional but I just had pills. It was fine. My first one had that terrible salty liquid and I cannot stand the salt. I had a very hard time with it, despite adding some flavoring. I just can't drink salt water. So my second one I got pills and it was miles and miles easier. Now the hardest part is fasting for a day.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
i disagree. content is great. hitting back button messes stuff up for me. a long form article is preferred for me but maybe this is better for people used to swiping.
> But that progress belongs almost entirely to people 50 and over. For people under 50, both incidence and mortality have been climbing. CRC is now the #1 cancer killer in men under 50.
You need to go to the 2nd screen "Split by age group"
You didn't actually click and read anything. Hank's page is saying exactly what the article you linked is saying. CRC is on the rise in young people. I'm not sure why the moderators changed the title of this post. It should be "Something is Going on with Colorectal Cancer."
Excellent science communication, as would be expected from this author.
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.
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 rare but can happen where long distance running causes ischemic colitis which is where on a long run enough blood is diverted from the large intestine that it damages the intestine long term. It isn't surprising to me that there's higher likelihood of colon cancer given this. It seems like repeated bouts of lower blood for the intestine on long runs has a cumulative impact and damages the colon even if it doesn't cause ischemic colitis.
This theory has been put forward, but it's important to point out that there is no real evidence yet. An alternative theory is diet, which is also the leading theory for increasing incidences in non-athletes. Highly processed, calorie dense foods have been on the watchlist for a while, and ultra endurance athletes have a special need for these to satisfy their caloric requirements. It could also be a combination of these factors or something else that was missed entirely so far.
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.
Interesting, I wasn't aware of that connection either. I was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer, but was identified as 'genetic' and not caused by diet or lifestyle. I used to be a heavy runner too, done a few marathons, and plenty more 10k, 8ks etc. Wonder if that could be a correlation... Treatments have it contained/in maintenance so at least I have that going for me.
I too was diagnosed with stage 2 rectal cancer, but it was back in 2005. How did they determine your cause was genetic?
Did the genetic genome tests from the biopsy, from a third party company. Helped guide the treatments.
Ah, that definitely wasn't offered to me as an option. Glad to see the progress however. It would be nice if there was an alternative test so that I could tell my kids it's not genetic.
It may be the damage of repetitive motion, it may be chemicals released into the bloodstream from endurance athletics. It may be something else. Without knowing the root cause, it's impossible to figure out the "sweet spot"
Could be a lot of things. Lots of long distance runners consume a lot of sugary gels to keep going. Not sure what the typical composition is, but likely lots of glucose and no fibre.
The marathon runners I know also seem to eat tons of junk food, they can get away with it from a weight perspective because a long run will burn it off, but it could have other consequences.
Point being: there's a lot about long distance runners that's quite different from other people.
But the rates of obese people who presumably consume a lot of sugars and carbs are 1/10th the rate of ultra marathon runners. It's scary to think that such conditioned athletes could be subject to this horrible disease.
i saw something recently that pointed to the fact that ultra runners end up with less blood in their guts while running for SO long its leading to cancers and such.
It's not simply endurance athletes though. It was 2x ultra-marathons >26 miles, or at least 5 marathons completed.
>2x ultra-marathons >26 miles, or at least 5 marathons completed
Yes, and it seems like it's really a 7.5x risk increase. Still pretty spectacular, though!
I really wonder what could cause that. Randomly throwing out possible causes: 1) blood redirected away from gut, 2) overuse of NSAIDS, 3) ultraprocessed foods (gels etc), 4) strange microbiome issues (gels + stress in gut from extreme exertion = altered gut flora?)
The study that found the result is DOI: 10.1200/JCO.2025.43.16_suppl.3619
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.
You shouldn't so offhandedly assume a hunter-gatherer lifestyle couldn't lead to issues like increased risk of CRC, or that activities which lead to increased risk of CRC couldn't be what hunter-gatherers did. Evolution is neither fast nor perfectly precise. Plenty of animal populations have common health problems that simply weren't harmful enough to reproduction to be selected out, much less something rare and late-onset like CRC.
I don't assume anything. From what we know about health of the last surviving hunter-gatherers, they suffer significantly less from "diseases of civilization" when taken in proportion to their settled neighbours. Some of those diseases (such as high blood pressure or diabetes 2nd type) seem to be totally absent in them. Cancers do happen, but not as often.
This pattern is quite old. Already ancient Egyptians suffered from civilizational diseases much more than hunter-gatherers, especially the richer ones (heart attacks, gout, cancer).
I won't bother checking or disputing the accuracy of your factual claims, because it does not matter.
Colorectal cancer is not the same thing as high blood pressure, or type 2 diabetes, or any other cancer that isn't colorectal cancer. Diseases are not a monolith and you cannot assume low risk of some diseases means low risk of others. That is wild guesswork passed off as logic, like measuring the shadow your testicles cast on the wall and announcing it is 24.1 degrees Celsius. Ultra-marathon runners also have low risk of type 2 diabetes!
Do you have specific evidence that modern hunter-gatherers have low rates of colorectal cancer that cannot be explained by survivorship bias, screening, genetic differences, and all other confounders, and that they are representative of historical hunter-gatherers? No? Then you cannot confidently conclude that hunter-gatherers didn't experience elevated rates of CRC.
Absolutely, we may have a depressed rate of CRC where ultramarathoners just get back up to the historical baseline. Who knows, but we don’t know it isn’t that.
"Diseases are not a monolith and you cannot assume low risk of some diseases means low risk of others. That is wild guesswork passed off as logic..."
Diseases are not a monolith, but they do tend to arise and fall in some specific clusters, and that is not "logic", good or bad (too many computer-minded people drag logic into the chaos that is biology), but rather a long-time empirical observation, albeit with some exceptions.
Your testicles, empirically, shrink when it gets cold. Do you think measuring their shadow is an acceptable substitute for a thermometer?
Sigh. Sure, if you had a gun to your head and you knew nothing else, it would be better to guess that a given population (hunter-gatherers) with low rates of some illnesses (T2D, HBP) also had low rates of another illness (CRC) than the reverse. Okay. That's a slightly better-than-chance guess, not anywhere near a solid basis for speculation.
"Anyways, it makes sense that marathoners get CRC because hunter-gatherers probably don't run that much" is bongcloud lalaland tier guesswork.
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)
> even though it’s a relatively benign procedure.
Not completely. Every once in a while they accidentally puncture the intestine with the probes and that becomes a significant medial problem. It doesn't happen often, but that is still a risk that doctors need to consider. If you are over 50 getting one every 10 years is a good idea, and there is some consideration if younger might be worth it. However so few people get colon cancer under 40 that it isn't worth the risks for most - but if there are other signs of a problem (either family history or symptoms) that changes things and it may be worth it.
I was diagnosed at 35 seven years ago with no history. Getting a colonoscopy never crossed my mind, much less being suggested by my general practitioner.
The trigger for me was blood in my stool. It was the slightest amount but I pursued it because that didn’t seem right. Turns out I had hemorrhoids which brought up something I feel hits others - I was embarrassed.
Fortunately the doctor that performed a banding procedure pushed me to get a colonoscopy purely out of being through and seeing the number of incidences increase at my age range.
I often wonder how much the embarrassment factor comes into play here.
For a screening procedure recommended as a mass conducted preventative measure in otherwise healthy people, harms must be regulated to a better standard than "doesn't happen often". The study that I read of was about serious issue occuring something like one in 120 procedures. It was done at Kaiser. Next time you're enjoying a sausage, take a moment to look at the sausage skins. If I understand correctly, our intestinal walls are quite thin, and even the colon vulnerable.
If you tell your doctor that a parent had polyps removed (say, recently), that will give you your best chance of getting one. Most likely, if you're in an even remotely progressive area, your doc wants you to have one, but their hands are tied by the insurance company. Afaik you dont have to provide any proof of your claim re parental polyps.
> but their hands are tied by the insurance company.
Doctors' ability to prescribe or refer is never restricted by an insurance company. If they think a patient should get whatever healthcare, they are free to say it.
You are just ignoring their intended meaning. Boring.
In CA, my doctor can refer me to get a Cologuard. But it's private pay, and they want payment up front since isurance companies don't restrict doctor's ability, only reimbursement.
So they may not be willing (even though they are able) perform procedure/test if they aren't confident they'll get paid.
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.
Can an MRI catch it? It would be ideal if the cost of MRIs came down so everyone could access it. Where's Moore's law for ~tricoders~ MRIs?
Lie about family history, but even colonoscopies are not perfect; I just had somebody in my family die of CRC because...
- They had symptoms and wanted a screening, but their PCP repeatedly denied them a referral for like a year because they were "too young".
- They lied about family history after symptoms got worse and got their referral.
- They got the colonoscopy which came back clean, and then symptoms continued to get worse.
- Finally their doctor gave them a referral for an MRI.
Results were stage 4 CRC. The doctor performing the colonoscopy missed the tumor, which was tucked into the sigmoid (the bend in your colon), where he didn't properly inflate because he wasn't taking it very seriously. It had a thumb-tip sized protrusion inside the colon but had gotten huge on the opposite side of the colon wall. They fought it for 8 years after the diagnosis and over 100 rounds of chemo (!!!), were about to get a new procedure at Yale, in which the doctor told them to think of it in terms of "this really may be a complete cure", but it was canceled because of the Big Beautiful Bill.
If you have symptoms (even if you don't), don't let some fuckass Nurse Practitioner tell you no. They don't know shit and they let their egos get in the way when they have to deal with moderately informed patients advocating for themselves. This was preventable and tge medicap system failed them because both the PCP and the doctor performing the colonoscopy were not paying attention to what they were being presented with and saw only their own expectations.
Also...apparently doctors wanted to lower the screening age to like 35, but insurance companies fought it, so it's at 45.
IANAL, just a CRC survivor and one who had my PCP miss my diagnosis a year before I started treatment. You may have a pretty good malpractice claim.
I'm a little removed from the situation, (not my nuclear family) but I believe the statute is up. It's too difficult to litigate in, say, the first two years of your stage 4 diagnosis before the law won't allow a suit.
>Also...apparently doctors wanted to lower the screening age to like 35, but insurance companies fought it, so it's at 45.
On this website, it is frequently opined that because health insurers have a legal minimum medical loss ratio, that health insurers prefer inflated costs so that their medical losses are higher, which means their premiums can be higher, which means their revenue is higher, which means their profit is higher.
I would have thought health insurers would support a lower screening age, especially since it would inflate costs for all insurers so everyone's cut of the now bigger pie gets bigger.
> 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.
From a 'public health' perspective, it makes perfect sense to limit the frequency of screening procedures by age and other broad risk-factors, but that doesn't help at the individual level if you fall on the unlucky side of those statistics.
Most cancers are still very much lethal once they progress to a certain point, and the best treatment we know of is early detection. Many of the cancer screens are harmless or don't add significant risk of death, so it really comes down to money and medical resource availability (also solved with money.)
I don't see much difference in someone paying out-of-pocket for a full-body MRI/colonoscopy vs. them spending way above average on any other item that slightly reduces the risk of dying (how many smoke alarms and fire extinguishers does your home have?)
while it sucks, paying for it out of pocket is probably cheaper if you can't get it covered. In the long run, $1500 as a bridge until your 40s feels cheaper than stage 4 cancer.
$1500? That sounds optimistic. I'm getting an upper endoscopy tomorrow and they've already told me it will be $4K. The equipment is similar, I expect colonoscopy is not cheaper.
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.
1: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10194058/
2: https://www.umassmed.edu/news/news-archives/2015/10/umms-col...
Though ostensibly supportive of your claim, the first article says it best a few pages in (surprisingly honest):
"To date, there are no clearly established biological mechanisms that could explain the role of red and processed meat in the process of CRC carcinogenesis."
In other words, we see some small signal in epidemiological studies, and we want to speculate about mechanistic causes, even though this has been tried before to no success.
I would point to the conclusion of the study: "Red and processed meat consumption and its interaction with the gut microbiota are found to be major associated factors. The CRC-associated gut microbiota is made of pro-inflammatory or pro-carcinogenic bacteria and opportunistic pathogenic bacteria that enrich the tumor microenvironment by promoting disease progression."
I would also add that the World Health Organization after evaluating 800 studies classified processed meat as a Group 1 carcinogen back in 2015, indicating a strong causal link to colorectal cancer, placing it in the same risk category as tobacco. [1]
While I linked to a single study in my original comment, I believe the results are more than a small signal.. enough for the WHO to come out and say processed meat does in fact have a causal link to CRC.
1: https://nutritionsource.hsph.harvard.edu/2015/11/03/report-s...
Why would meat cause a decrease in incidence for older folks but a higher incidence for younger folks?
Additionally, the risks you quantify for general cancer incidence are at the bottom odds ratios listed at the end for early-onset. Speculating that ultra-endurance athletes eat tons of meat, without any evidence, seems quite misplaced.
2025 study on the diet quality of ultra-marathon runners: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11820624/
From the discussion section, "It is important to note that inadequate intake in the athletes of the present study may carry significant negative health implications. Insufficient consumption of fruits and wholegrains has been linked to the development of chronic diseases, including CVD, cancer, T2D, and hypertension. Additionally, high intake of sodium, saturated fat and discretionary food items are correlated with higher incidence of obesity, T2D, CVD, dementia, and cancer. Paradoxically, despite exceeding the WHO guidelines for physical activity by a substantial margin, these athletes are not meeting dietary recommendations essential for long-term health, highlighting the potential risks posed by these inadequacies."
I wonder why fiber is never brough up with this. Only ~5% of people get enough fiber and it lowers your risk a lot
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?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6819207/
> 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.
> 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.
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.
40% of the US population is older than 45, and millenial includes < 50th percentile.
We're also talking about alcohol consumption. Only half of Gen Z can drink and none of Alpha.
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?
We millennials are all middle age.
There's roughly 4 to 5 generations alive at any point and the middle generation is going to be considered both old and young by the generations surrounding it.
Once Gen beta starts we'll be officially old.
Middle age != Middle generation.
I understand your point. But you're redefining widely accepted usage of these terms. Nobody would call a 30 year old "middle age."
You're right. 8 year olds would call you ancient and 80 year olds would call you a baby. Middle age is relative and unless you're over 45 you don't admit to it, and then hold on to it for too long.
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.
This finding is crazy! I wonder how many modern health issues have to do with healthy blood/nutrient flow to tissues, that are basically solved with either mild/moderately amounts of movement and a balanced diet.
I thought lots of data indicated that millennials were drinking less than previous generations?
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.)
Obviously this is just anecdotal and you could still be correct, but the two celebrities the article cited (Chadwick Boseman and James Van Der Beek) don’t seem to fit that mold.
Hey Hank, if youre on HN, you're one of my favorite humans that I don't personally know.
If Hank Green even knew what Hacker News was, I think my respect for him would diminish considerably.
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.
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.
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!
Food delivery is now an "essential" for more people than it ever was before. Doordash/Uber Eats is how a weirdly large amount of people eat in general.
The rate of increase in childhood obesity went up during covid.
My Dr just ordered a test for colon cancer. If it's positive, I'm dead. I don't have enough savings to score a hospital bed, nevertheless surgery.
In this, I'm in the same boat as millions of other Americans. Positive medical news rarely applies to us.
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.
One of Europe's leading nutrition experts also highlighted energy drinks in connection with the growing incidence of colon cancer among young people.
Sugary drinks is one of the cited contributers in this piece.
What evidence is there of that?
Years ago, I went to a show where Hank Green sang a song about his IBS. I still chuckle at the lyric about rerouting his bowel to a spigot.
That being said, I wish this was a normal page that scrolled. The click click click just breaks the web.
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.
Made even more annoying by the "next page" button constantly moving with the page height.
Very annoying UX, I found it felt like it was breaking continuity and making the ideas on each page disjointed.
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.
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.
Go look at the graphs again. The “split by age” graph shows an increase in diagnosis of ~60%, but an increase in mortality of only ~10%. That’s not a small difference, and we aren’t that good at curing colon cancer.
GP’s hypothesis is one of the leading explanations for this trend, but of course gets rejected by advocates for colonoscopy. Taking into account error bars on these numbers (which author doesn’t show, because they are inconvenient to the argument being made), it seems at least somewhat likely that the explanation for the rise in younger cases is due to increased screening, with the “increased” mortality either being statistical noise, or misattribution of deaths that also would have occurred in earlier periods.
Does treatment ever speed up death? Given that chemo is super hard on the body I imagine it could? That might just account for your use of “mostly”, though.
It would depend on the treatment. In my case I had neoadjuvant radiation followed by chemo, then surgery, capped off with more chemo to kill any cancer cells that might have tried to make a dash for it. I would assume that while the radiation treatment elevated my risk for future cancers, the greater risk was my 10 hour surgical procedure.
C'mon, I already said that, that was half of my comment!
No, it can't explain that; but the rise is very small. On the per 100,000 mortality graphs divided into the age cohorts, the under fifty mortality is almost a flat line. There is something there, but it doesn't seem like a huge alarm.
If anyone here is up for disrupting the medical field: please come up with a colonoscopy-equivalent with a less awful prep experience.
I think they could do pretty well just not adding bubble gum or whatever nasty flavors the prep has. Sure it'll still be unpleasant and salty, but burping up that nonsense all day really doesn't make it better.
Depending on the doctor some are now recommending getting a tub of miralax, mixing it all into gatorade, and using that for prep instead of the prescription stuff.
Still sucks, but at least it isn't a disgusting flavor, although I haven't had a desire for blue gatorade in the last 3 years
This may be regional but I just had pills. It was fine. My first one had that terrible salty liquid and I cannot stand the salt. I had a very hard time with it, despite adding some flavoring. I just can't drink salt water. So my second one I got pills and it was miles and miles easier. Now the hardest part is fasting for a day.
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.
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
By far the worst part. By far.
Though having to push out a huge fart at the request of the nurse while they stare at you when you wake up is a close 2nd.
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.
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.
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
Very effective way of conveying information.
I think a major factor is the increase in microplastics in our diets.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S18777...
i disagree. content is great. hitting back button messes stuff up for me. a long form article is preferred for me but maybe this is better for people used to swiping.
Strange, because I've heard the exact opposite...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/colorectal-cancer-keeps-risin...
That is EXACTLY what the post is saying:
> But that progress belongs almost entirely to people 50 and over. For people under 50, both incidence and mortality have been climbing. CRC is now the #1 cancer killer in men under 50.
You need to go to the 2nd screen "Split by age group"
Maybe their website sucks and all I saw was 2 graphs
You didn't actually click and read anything. Hank's page is saying exactly what the article you linked is saying. CRC is on the rise in young people. I'm not sure why the moderators changed the title of this post. It should be "Something is Going on with Colorectal Cancer."