I'm a survivor of colon cancer so I'm interested in this news. And I had a flat lesion that proved to be cancerous.
The long and the short of it is that patients need to be sure that gastro-enterologists who do colonoscopies for us are looking for polyps and flat lesions (which may even be depressed thus less visible). A 15 minute screening procedure won't do! There's a dye that can show flat lesions and assist detection.
The study, of 1,819 military veterans, mostly men, found that 9.35 percent had flat lesions, and those lesions were five times as likely as polyps to contain cancerous or precancerous tissue. Depressed or indented lesions were the least common but the most risky. Together, the flat or depressed lesions accounted for only 15 percent of the potentially cancerous growths found in the study, but were involved in half of the cancers. Once the doctors spotted the flat lesions, they sprayed a bluish dye on them to see their outlines better and remove them completely.
1 comment:
As someone whose father died of colon cancer two years ago, whose mother has had polyps removed. whose grandmother had colostomy, and so on, this article was very sobering, indeed.
I congratulate you on your beating of this silent killer.
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