Five years after a colonoscopy found and removed polyps, one in ten patients will have a new advanced polyp and six in every thousand will be diagnosed with colorectal cancer.

Pooling studies that followed up nearly 10,000 men and women who had a polyp removed during a colonoscopy (polypectomy), researchers found 1,082 with a later advanced adenoma and 58 with colorectal cancer.  Median follow-up time was 47 months. Read the rest of this entry »

Regular use of multivitamins didn’t reduce risk for colorectal and other cancers in a diverse group of 162,000 women from sites across the United States.  After eight years of follow-up, there was no significant difference in cancer, heart disease, or death between multivitamin users and those who didn’t take the supplements. Read the rest of this entry »

Average risk men and women and their doctors can estimate the probability of that individual developing colon or rectal cancer by using an interactive tool available online.  Developed by National Cancer Institute, the model is based on population research and cancer incidence information.

In developing the prediction tool, researchers matched 1,600 men and women with colon cancer and 650 with rectal cancer to nearly 1,900 similar individuals without cancer.   Using identified risk factors for colorectal cancer, they were able to estimate the probability than an individual would develop colon or rectal cancer within the next 5, 10, or 20 years.  The prospective National Institute of Health-American Association of Retired Persons diet and health study was used to validate the tool. Read the rest of this entry »

People with a combination of three common medical conditions together known as metabolic syndrome have a greatly increased risk of colorectal cancer.  The three are hypertension, diabetes and elevated cholesterol.

Reviewing answers the the National Health Interview Survey, researchers found that people who reported metabolic syndrome conditions were almost twice as likely to have colorectal cancer.  Nearly 58,000 people were interviewed by the NHIS in 2002-2003.  Of those 1,200 had metabolic syndrome and 350 had been diagnosed with colorectal cancer.  Read the rest of this entry »

single nucleotide polymorphism

People with a variation in the gene that controls how fat is metabolized by cells have a lowered chance of getting colorectal cancer, even in families with already increased risk.

Scientists studied differences in short regions of the ADIPOQ gene called single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) among patients with colorectal cancer and a similar group of people who didn’t have cancer. In two different study groups, they found that one variation reduced risk of getting cancer by about 30 percent. Read the rest of this entry »