“The bottom line is we just don’t know,” said Dr. Robin B. Mendelsohn, co-director of the Center for Young Onset Colorectal Cancer at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, which was opened in 2018 to treat younger patients and study the reasons for their diagnoses. Everybody should begin getting screenings at age 45, the American Cancer Society and other expert groups recommend. But people with a family history of colon cancer should start getting tested at age 40, or at 10 years younger than the age at which their family member was diagnosed, whichever is sooner. “The five-year survival rate for young people for early-stage disease is 94 percent,” said Rebecca L. Siegel, the scientific director of surveillance research at the American Cancer Society. For people with late stages of the disease, the survival rate can be as low as 20 percent, she said.

Source: New York Times August 29, 2020 21:56 UTC