What You Should Know About Colon Cancer

When you get to be a certain age, many issues that may not have been a major concern when you were younger become problems that you and your doctor must look out for and screen for on a regular basis. Among these newfound worries is colon cancer. It is likely that you never even thought about colon cancer before, but now it is another health concern to add to your list as your age keeps on creeping up the charts. So, before you panic and succumb to needless worry and stress, get to know the important facts about colon cancer and what you can do to prevent and treat it.

How Is Colon Cancer Detected And Prevented?

When you reach the age of 50, your doctor will recommend that you get your first screening colonoscopy. A colonoscopy is a procedure in which your doctor places a probe in your rectum and threads it up through your colon to look for abnormalities known as polyps. If polyps are detected on your colon, they will be biopsied (surgically removed) to determine whether or not they are cancerous. 

Polyps are often an early warning sign of colon cancer or are pre-cancerous, meaning you do not have cancer yet, but it could soon develop. By checking the colon and removing the polyps, you could be preventing cancer or, at the very least, detecting colon cancer early so that you have more treatment options and a better prognosis.

People with an average risk of developing colon cancer (i.e. no previous cancer diagnosis and no family history of colon cancer) should plan on screenings every 5 years for a digital colonoscopy and/or other less invasive procedures, and a full colonoscopy every 10 years. For those at higher risk or who have cancer-positive test results, a doctor will likely recommend more frequent screenings.

What Are The Treatment Options?

The first step in colon cancer treatment is to surgically remove the cancerous cells. If the polyps turn out to be the only cancerous cells in the colon, this means your cancer is in the earliest stages and surgery may be the only treatment necessary. However, if it has spread to other tissues in the colon, or has penetrated through the colon wall into other areas of the body, more extensive treatments may be necessary. 

Surgery can be performed to just remove the polyps if necessary, or a surgical team can also resect (remove) an entire section of the colon that is cancerous. Oftentimes, colon cancer surgery is followed up with chemotherapy to ensure that, even if the cancer seems to have been removed surgically, any undetected cancer cells are eradicated as well.

Additionally, if the colon cancer is too extensive to be completely removed from the body through surgery, combinations of chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and targeted therapies (also known as immunotherapy) will be used to attack the cancer in different ways. Immunotherapy and radiation therapy specifically target cancer cells in certain areas of the body or of certain types and kill them, whereas chemotherapy works by attacking any rapidly reproducing cells in the body. Thus, chemotherapy may find and kill cancer cells elsewhere in the body, while the other two treatments are more focused.

As you can see, while colon cancer is not something you ever want to deal with, it is, more often than not, manageable and treatable with a variety of treatment options. So, be sure that you begin your colon cancer screenings at age 50 and you continue to get checked regularly thereafter to help prevent and detect colon cancer.  

For more information, contact a local clinic or medical center like Rahway Regional Cancer Center


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