Colon Cancer: The Enigma of the Young Sick

Christiane Fux studied journalism and psychology in Hamburg. The experienced medical editor has been writing magazine articles, news and factual texts on all conceivable health topics since 2001. In addition to her work for, Christiane Fux is also active in prose. Her first crime novel was published in 2012, and she also writes, designs and publishes her own crime plays.

More posts by Christiane Fux All content is checked by medical journalists.

Colon cancer is an old-age disease? It is not quiet right. More and more young people are suffering from it - no one currently knows exactly why. The tragedy: With them, cancer, which is actually well curable, is often overlooked for a long time. interviewed experts and a person affected. What can you do?

Women who are pregnant do not always float on cloud nine. Exhaustion, nausea, and bleeding hemorrhoids are extremely uncomfortable but common side effects. Melanie is also not doing well during pregnancy. She feels weak, discovers blood in her stool. But for her, it is not hormonal turbulence that is causing the symptoms. With her it's cancer.

Doctor-to-doctor odyssey

The 39-year-old who lives near Nuremberg tells the story. About the doctor odyssey she went through until her illness was finally recognized. From the moment the doctor sat by her bed in the hospital and said it, "You have colon cancer."

“I was so incredibly exhausted all the time,” she says. But only when she collapses does her family doctor send her to the hospital. "If this patient says she can't take it anymore, it has to be serious," he tells the clinician to take along. The serious thing, it turns out, is a tumor in the colon the size of a golf ball.

Every year three percent more younger patients

Colon cancer still predominantly affects people over the age of 70. Only about seven percent of those infected in Germany are younger than 50. But their number is steadily increasing. asked Michael Hoffmeister about this. He is an epidemiologist at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ). If anyone knows what might be behind it, it is him.

"More recent studies also report an annual increase in colon cancer in Germany of around three percent in people under the age of 50," he confirms. But there is still speculation about the causes. “There are plausible hypotheses. But we now need scientific studies that specifically examine the causes and characteristics of colon cancer in younger patients. "

Is it just lifestyle to blame?

The most common explanation: the unhealthy lifestyle that many have. Malnutrition, sedentary lifestyle and obesity are factors that fuel the risk of colon cancer. Overweight alone now affects more than half of the adult population - and more and more children and adolescents too.

How strong this affects can already be seen in the rapidly increasing cases of type 2 diabetes. This form of diabetes used to be called adult diabetes. Today he also increasingly meets children. It seems plausible that the risk factors could also affect the incidence of colon cancer.

However, the number is increasing significantly even among those under 30 - even if the total numbers are still low. But can an unfavorable lifestyle be the cause even at such a young age? After all, colon polyps, which are the preliminary stage of colon cancer, usually grow slowly and only degenerate after years.

Insidious mix of unfavorable factors

Even Prof. Diana Lüftner from the Berlin Charité does not believe that this can be the whole truth. "It is only because the explanation that the malnutrition is to blame is so beautifully simple that it is pulled out of the hat like a rabbit," says the oncologist, who is particularly committed to the problem within the framework of the German Foundation for Young Cancer Patients.

It is certainly not a coincidence that a very young person who has only been exposed to negative environmental influences for a relatively short period of time falls ill with colon cancer. “Several unfavorable causes must come together,” she says.

A treacherous mix of genetic predisposition and an external cancer trigger that interact in a fatal way. “We are still in the dark about what exactly that could be. Perhaps something completely different also plays a role than we previously suspected. "

Younger people fall by the wayside

Finding out what's behind it would be immensely important. This is the only way to identify young people who are particularly at risk and who now fall through the early detection grid. Because it routinely only applies to 50, for men, or 55 for women - and from this age group has impressively reduced the number of illnesses in recent decades.

"In order to get to the bottom of the complex processes, one would need subject-specific register studies," says Lüftner. “Without this, we cannot recognize any patterns.” Comprehensive molecular-genetic profiles of as many patients as possible should be recorded. "Unfortunately, the hurdles are very high," regrets the oncologist.

Financing such a database, and above all organizing it, and overcoming the bureaucratic and data protection obstacles, is an enormous challenge.

Until then, all that remains is to examine younger people if parents or siblings are ill - and if alarm signs such as inexplicable abdominal pain or blood in the stool appear.

Survived, but with wounds

Melanie, the young mother from Bavaria, survived her cancer. But the late diagnosis cost her a lot. She lives with an artificial anus. A bag for the excretions is stuck to her stomach. “Not as bad as you think,” she says. Large parts of her vaginal tissue also had to be removed. "When I first saw this, I wanted to die - but now that it's healed, that's actually pretty okay," she says.

Like millions of other parents in Germany, she is currently trying to smuggle her two daughters, nine and eleven, through the school hurdles of the pandemic. It works great with the big one, with the younger it is a daily challenge. But it is particularly stressful: Melanie has not yet been vaccinated against Corona. “I really hope that it will work out soon,” she says. In addition to the constant subliminal fear of a relapse that always accompanies her anyway, this is a burden that she would rather be rid of sooner rather than later.

The lost child

Perhaps the hardest thing to carry is: In the lockdown at home, due to the pandemic, she does not have to look after three children, but only two. The little boy she was pregnant with during her cancer illness died in the womb. “I was just too weak,” says Melanie. The doctors, who recognized the cancer so late, are not angry, "well, maybe the first one". All the symptoms would have called out loud "cancer". "But none of them just had that on their screen."

You can find more information from, for and about young people with cancer here:
https://junge-erwachsene-mit-krebs.de/

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