Who's Getting Colon Cancer

With rates rising among younger people, testing should start sooner

- Charlotte Hilton Andersen

Jana Boyer was 54 in June 2021 when she and her husband travelled to Mexico to renew their wedding vows. As they were getting ready to fly home, she started experiencing stomach problems. She called her doctor, who recommended she get checked out by a gastroenterologist to see if she’d picked up a parasite from contaminated food or water.

“My sister-in-law is a retired colorectal nurse, and she’d been bugging me to get a colonoscopy since I’d turned 50,” Boyer says. “I’d kept putting it off, but I figured I might as well kill two birds with one stone.”

That colonoscopy probably saved her life. The procedure detected a mass measuring 3 centimeters in her large intestine. Further tests determined that the mass was malignant, and she immediately had surgery, followed by six months of chemotherapy. Until her trip to Mexico, Boyer hadn’t experienced any symptoms that might have been signs of colon cancer.

“Most colorectal cancers cause no symptoms in the early stage, when they are most treatable,” explains Folasade May, a gastroenterologist and an associate professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. “This is why starting at age 45, everyone needs to get screened for colorectal cancer, regardless of whether you have symptoms or not.” Those symptoms, when they do occur, include rectal bleeding, blood in the stool, constipation and other sudden bowel changes.