Hacker News

I’m in my early 30s and am starting to think about getting a screening. Problem is, it’s not trivial to do. You have to really upsell your doctor to get one so early, even though it’s a relatively benign procedure.

There is a noninvasive testing method called Shield but it is way too flawed to be reliable (with poor positive rates for malignant tumors)

Wow, I had no idea there is a 15X increase for endurance athletes. Make me want to dial down the running a bit, which make you wonder where the sweet spot is for distance training.

Something I've never seen in these analyses is drinking. Millennials are heavy drinkers. Both craft brews and cocktails were defining generational traits. Not everyone is a drinker but it appears they are heavy drinkers compared to other generations.

The theory behind the ultra marathoners is that extreme distance running disrupts the epithelial layer and microbiome in the gut. Wouldn't drinking have similar effects?

My Dr just ordered a test for colon cancer. However, if it's positive, I'm dead. I don't have enough savings to score a hospital bed, nevertheless surgery.

In this, I'm in the same boat as millions of other Americans. Positive medical news rarely applies to us.

The graph showing risk factors in age groups 18-49 is interesting - obesity, "sugary drinks (>2/day)", and sedentary lifestyle (>2 hr TV/day) are each about 1.5-2x increase in risk factor. Obesity has roughly doubled over this time period, and people are more sedentary. What I could find about "sugary drinks" seems to indicate it hasn't changed much or even dropped slightly over this time. So obesity/sedentary lifestyle probably explains a lot of the increase (maybe not everything, but probably close; a 50% increase in population incidence, where a ~2x risk factor affected ~50% of the population would explain it.)

Excellent content. The delivery mechanism of the site cited is very polarizing! At the very least it’s generated a lot of opinions. If I think of the target audience used to TikTok engagements it makes a lot of sense. It’s swipey influenced and interactive. It breaks the back button oh well we have browser tabs right?

The web is best for me when experimental UX like this is tried out.

How much of the rise do the listed later on (endurance athletes, obesity, sugary drinks, sedentary lifestyle) explain the relative youth rise? After all, some of this was an issue in 2006 as it is in 2026. Does it explain most of the relative rise, or is there a major missing piece / a mystery still to be explained? I doubt the % of endurance athletes changed meaningfully population-wide, to be a major contributing factor, for example.

One of Europe's leading nutrition experts also highlighted energy drinks in connection with the growing incidence of colon cancer among young people.

If you screen more people for the disease, and do it better, such that you reduce the incidences and fatalities in the 50+ cohort, that improvement logically implies that you must be catching incidences in the under 50 cohort. So it's going to skew the numbers. Incidences that would have been tallied in the 50+ cohort, are now counted in the under 50.

E.g. a 45-year-old with a latent colorectal cancer who would previously not have been diagnosed early, but only late when they developed symtpoms, by which time they hit 50, would have counted as an incidence or a likely fatality, among the 50+ data. But if that same individual had been caught at 45, they would have counted as an incidence against int he under-50 cohort.

Earlier, better and more available screening alone will shift the data this way.

Years ago, I went to a show where Hank Green sang a song about his IBS. I still chuckle at the lyric about rerouting his bowel to a spigot.

That being said, I wish this was a normal page that scrolled. The click click click just breaks the web.

If anyone here is up for disrupting the medical field: please come up with a colonoscopy-equivalent with a less awful prep experience.

Even in Czechia, where the combination of traditional "heavy" food and, probably, some sort of genetic burden (people with Czech ancestry tend to suffer from colorectal cancers even if they live in regions with very different diets) used to make us the record holders, mortality has gone significantly down.

Humanity seems to be getting this particular snake in its grip.

I stopped after the 4th click, I found it irritating to have to click to get 1 or 2 sentences at a time. This would have been just fine as a short article, making it interactive annoyed me more than the revealed content informed.

My layman's thoughts are it has something to do with young people spending way too much time on the toilet sitting doomscrolling on their phones. (also yes to microplastics and endocrine disruptiors)

Also, hope that bidets may help with it in some way? Bidets supposedly reduce hemorrhoids.

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It's rare to see a website that fails to display anything without JS being enabled that also has such nice looking code. I'm both disappointed and impressed! Reading between the script tags was enough to get the idea at least

Very effective way of conveying information.

I think a major factor is the increase in microplastics in our diets.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S18777...

Strange, because I've heard the exact opposite...

https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/colorectal-cancer-keeps-risin...