Colon Cancer Isn’t Just an Older Person's Disease Anymore | Hacker News Reader

Colon Cancer Isn’t Just an Older Person's Disease Anymore

bloomberg.com

I am taking a class in my college on environmental literature. One thing I learned is how environmental issues are consistently swept under the rug and underreported (like in this article, written by a former chemical & engineering news reporter) in society's discourse on cancer. All the blame for cancer is put on you and your habits, whether smoking or red meat. Big perps of this information campaign include the American Cancer Society. But as really good books like Silent Spring and When Smoke Ran Like Water show, environmental pollution and pesticides consistently correlate with rising cancer rates in modern society. It is ludicrous that one of two men and one of three women will be stricken with the disease in their lifetimes. Why is such a massive factor being hidden from the public? All this noise and focus on treatment... yet no focus on prevention. Because that would require economic changes that put a burden on corporations.

We're poisoning entire generations for the profit of a few.

That's the invisible hand of the free market for you

Enlightening comment. Why's it a failure exclusive to capitalism? Would this not have happened under a mixed economy, or a centrally-planned one?

I would expect other systems to optimise/maximise other things, the current, especially in the US thanks to lobbies and borderline corrupt politicians + conflicts of interests, maximises wealth acquisition and cost reduction without any regard for health or long term effects

It's really similar to the tobacco industry back in the days, and will probably end up the same way (fingers crossed)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DboTyNu-FLk

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2866605/

Differing incentives under different structures

> Is something in our diet, like processed meats and sugary drinks, to blame? Could this be linked to the rise in obesity?

Dr Peter Attia on the Tim Ferris podcast in 2019 suggested it's the fructose in sugary drinks.

> Sugar as a liquid versus sugar as a solid behave differently and also the dose matters, but if you take a bolus of liquid sugar, it’s going to make it further down the GI tract than the solid. Certainly, in animals, the evidence, Lew Cantley actually published this study in Science about four months ago. You could basically take a mouse model that is primed to get colon cancer and you had three groups. One group is getting just a bolus of glucose. The other group is just getting a bolus of fructose liquid, and the other is getting a bolus of sugar, glucose and fructose together. You could make that animal explode in colon cancer with the sugar, the glucose fructose.

https://tim.blog/2019/12/07/peter-attia-transcript/

https://archive.ph/J1iOg

Original paper: https://acsjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.3322/...

Can microplastics be ruled out? I ask because they are known to massively damage the stomach linings of some birds.

Given the rising rates of cancer in the young across multiple sites, microplastics feel like the most likely culprit from people who are non-experts given it is the thing that has become more prominent in the last few decades. I have no idea though if it can be ruled out or not.

> has become more prominent in the last few decades.

malnutrition too: https://www.niddk.nih.gov/-/media/Images/Health-Information/...

Graph comes from obesity statistics here - https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statisti...

(Aside it’s confusing to post a graph that doesn’t have a title without context)

Whats the biological mechanism for plastic causing cancer?

Some chemicals could act as fake hormones or mimicking grow factors, for example

Most plastics are just polypropylene or polystyrene. It's just long chains of hydrocarbons and is inert.

Plastics sometimes have plasticizers added, but if you're talking about microplastics, the amount of those chemicals in a microscopic piece of plastic is negligible.

Plasticizers act as endocrine disruptors and are active at levels comparable to hormones. Namely extremely low quantities. An analogy is to compare the voltage levels of our electric grid to the voltage levels of our communication systems. It’s possible to really screw up communication by inserting tiny bits of voltage into the wrong parts of the system.

Small is not always negligible.

Doses of hormones are in the milligram range to have a biological effect.

Please explain how a 50 microgram piece of microplastic contains enough endocrine disruptor to have a biological effect?

> Doses of hormones are in the milligram range to have a biological effect.

Not even close. This is grossly overstated unless you talk about the full amount in the organism, that is an useless measure. Hormones act locally and trigger profound irreversible consequences in really tiny doses

> Please explain me how a 50 microgram piece of plastic contains enough endocrine disruptor to have a biological effect?

Adding its effects to the rest of the microplastics.

A handbook of Endocrinology will explain it much better, with tables, graphs and images.

> Most plastics are [safe]

Then the problem should be in the rest.

My mom died from colon cancer at age 44. She seemed healthy, she didnt smoke, barely drank.. then one summer night, a call that mom is in the hospital, a night later, it's colon cancer, and then the funeral.

She insisted her three kids each get screened as soon as insurance would pay for it. And so, in order, each of us went at age 30, or 35, for our first, and each of us has had the type of polyp that makes a doctor go "hrm" removed.

Probably they just go hrm and remove all of them though. Anyways, I'm not a doctor, and I also can't meditate upon the health of my colon enough to correctly assess its health; I remain convinced these early scans are going to really help me and what's left of my family out, and I'm glad to bother with it.

Just go do it, if you're putting it off. It's more annoying than getting a filling but it's less annoying than getting three fillings.

Likewise, my mum (as British) died at 65 of bowel (again, British, colon otherwise) cancer. Planning on starting to look at private screening from 40 here.

Had my first colonoscopy about 3 months ago.

The experience in total was far less of a problem than what I had anticipated based on the comments of others who had gone through the procedure.

In short, it is really not a big deal, including the fasting and cleansing part.

"Researchers are trying to determine what’s behind the shift. Among the questions: Is there something biologically different about these early onset tumors? Is something in our diet, like processed meats and sugary drinks, to blame? Could this be linked to the rise in obesity?"

I wonder whether some researcher would even dare investigating whether this is related to increase in anal sex incidence in younger people.

Came here to ask that. HPV is known to cause cervical cancer in women. It’s also implicated in neck cancer passed due to oral sex.

Why would you ever link to paywall sites?!

"Tell HN: Paywalls with workarounds are OK; paywall complaints are off topic"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989

If someone says “hey check out some information” and I can’t see that information I’m pretty sure me saying so is on topic. Even if somebody’s FAQ asserts otherwise.

Always check the comments when a paywalled link is posted. In this case a link to a readable copy was added within a minute of the original post

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