simon chapman , university of sydney
bowel cancer is australia’s second biggest cancer killer after lung cancer, claiming the lives of 4,162 people every year, nearly 95% of whom are aged 50 years or more. a total of 14,958 people were newly diagnosed with the disease in 2013. both men and women are at risk of developing bowel cancer, with a split of around 55% male and 45% female.
bowel cancer barely makes it on the tv news when you compare how common it is. our 2010 research showed bowel cancer news reports accounted for 4.1% of all news reports about cancer but bowel cancer represents 13.5% of newly diagnosed cancers and 11.5% of cancer deaths.
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this is changing with efforts such as celebrity bowel cancer ambassadors and greatly increased publicity being driven by the national campaign and cancer councils.
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at 65, i was perhaps overdue for a second encounter. the death of a neighbour in his 50s and two colleagues diagnosed with bowel cancer in recent years gave me no hesitation when the trigger of a mailed invitation and kit from the national bowel cancer screening program to have a faecal occult blood test (fobt) arrived.
my stool sample was positive (it contained blood), as are the results for about one in 14 people who take an fobt test. but there are many reasons other than cancer for blood in the stool. i take a low-dose aspirin tablet every day, which can cause intestinal bleeding , and that may have been responsible.
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last month the lancet published results from the longest follow-up study of people screened for bowel cancer.
researchers followed 170,034 people for a median 17.1 years, some screened once with sigmoidoscopy , which is like a colonoscopy but doesn’t go as deep into the bowel, and others who had not had sigmoidoscopy.
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the cancer council australia recommends people over 50 years have a fobt test every two years. people in the lancet report only had one sigmoidoscopy. but fobt can show evidence of asymptomatic bleeding that you may have never noticed, allowing early life-saving intervention.
bowel cancer australia provides extensive information and answers to frequently asked questions about the disease and the screening program.
simon chapman , emeritus professor in public health, university of sydney
this article is republished from the conversation under a creative commons license. read the original article .