Tuesday, January 10, 2017

What Do You Know about Colorectal Cancer?


Colorectal Cancer malady is closed to my heart. In the late 1990's I was diagnosed with stage 1 colon cancer. The cancer was removed by surgery and I am fine. On the other hand my son-in-law died four years ago from Colon cancer because it was not diagnosed early. It was already on stage 4 when he learned he had the disease. Because of this I did some web search on the prevalence of the disease in the US. Here's what I found.

Excluding skin cancers, colorectal cancer is the third most common cancer diagnosed in both men and women in the United States. The American Cancer Society’s estimates for the number of colorectal cancer cases in the United States for 2016 are:5,270 new cases of colon cancer and 39,220 new cases of rectal cancer.

Overall, the lifetime risk of developing colorectal cancer is: about 1 in 21 (4.7%) for men and 1 in 23 (4.4%) for women. This risk is slightly lower in women than in men. A number of other factors (described in Colorectal cancer risk factors) can also affect your risk for developing colorectal cancer.

Colorectal cancer is the third leading cause of cancer-related deaths in the United States when men and women are considered separately, and the second leading cause when both sexes are combined. It is expected to cause about 49,190 deaths during 2016.

The death rate (the number of deaths per 100,000 people per year) from colorectal cancer has been dropping in both men and women for several decades. There are a number of likely reasons for this. One is that colorectal polyps are now being found more often by screening and removed before they can develop into cancers or are being found earlier when the disease is easier to treat. In addition, treatment for colorectal cancer has improved over the last few decades. As a result, there are now more than 1 million survivors of colorectal cancer in the United States.

Visit the American Cancer Society’s Cancer Statistics Center for more key statistics.

Source: www.cancer.org/colorectal

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