Age, Gender, Sex and Race and Risk of Colon Cancer

Everyone wants to know when they’re at risk. Some risks are obvious: for example, your chances of being in a car accident increase or decrease depending on your age (young drivers are inexperienced and higher risks behind the wheel, as are elderly individuals whose reflexes or eye sight might be failing). Your risk also increases if you’re attempting to drive blind drunk. Obvious, right?

But other risks are less easily spotted, and are often more important to the public. Wouldn’t you like to know if, at a certain age, your risk of developing a disease skyrocketed? Would you want to be told that as a Caucasian, or African American, your risk of contracting a condition doubled? Tripled?

Risk of Colon Cancer

It would seem to me that someone at higher risk of being diagnosed with something like diabetes, or cancer, would do whatever he or she could to manage that risk. To make changes in other areas of their life. Now, a man can’t just switch sexes to avoid testicular cancer, but he might be more alert and consistent with self-examinations if he had a family history of the disease.

So, keeping all of this in mind, the following presents the results of research presented at the Digestive Disease Week 2007. You can now finally get the facts on your age, weight, gender and race and how they increase your risk of contracting the 2nd biggest cancer killer in the developed world: colon cancer.

First: obesity. People are getting fatter. It’s the truth. And evidence is stacking up against the overweight population, firmly showing that normal weight individuals have a much lower chance of colorectal cancer.

Gender? Men are at about equal risk as women for fatally contracting colon cancer; however, linked directly with the previous information on obesity, it would seem that overweight women are at the higher risk than overweight men.

How about age? Well, it’s well known that colon cancer is more common in the elderly, but what about the “oldest of the old”? Patients over 85 often weren’t offered surgical or chemotherapy procedures, with the risk being deemed greater than the potential benefit. Now, however, elderly patients are being recommended for aggressive treatments, including surgery, to maximize the chance of survival.

Finally: race. It would seem African Americans have been having progressively greater colon cancer rates since the mid-1990’s. The cause of this is unknown; however, the best protection against this statistic is early, effective diagnosis. So don’t be shy and get tested!

As mentioned before, many of these risk factors are unavoidable, but some of them are, like obesity. If you find yourself at a high risk for colon cancer, just talk to your doctor. In addition to lifestyle changes, your doctor can potentially provide you with an anti-cancer plan, to minimize your risks and keep you living as long as possible. Because chances are for casino games, not the game of life.