[Wonnk13]

36 y/o male with stage 4 colon cancer. Diagnosed in 2016. Lifelong triathlete / healthy eater. I think it's easy to write this off and just better screening, but I think that's certainly a necessary, but not sufficient explanation.

I'm open to other ideas, but I have to imagine some of this is due to changes in our environment and food supply. plastics everywhere, pesticides in our food, pollution in the air.

[dev_throw]

Stage 4 as well, diagnosed in 2021. Lifelong vegetarian, mostly ate organic foods and generally active. I always suspected something was wrong with my gut, but didn't think it would be cancer. No genetic component either.

[Dig1t]

What made you suspect it? What symptoms did you have?

[dev_throw]

Irregular bowel movements, cramps that I couldn't attribute to what I ate, inexplicable fatigue. Eventually it was a bright red blood in stool which made me force my doctor to take it seriously.

[lelandfe]

Welp. This sounds like me. Time to talk to my doctor. I’ve been nervous to.

[caeril]

Be careful with this, or at least scaring/stressing yourself with this. Fresh (bright red) blood in stool is 95% of the time hemorrhoids. Most colon cancers will present with old (very dark red, or black) blood in stool.

[IncreasePosts]

How did they actually find it? Endoscopy?

[grubbs]

Jesus - you had to force your doc to take it seriously? Like beg for a colonoscopy or something?

[Magi604]

My doctors have been like that too. I have to pull their teeth when I want some sort of screening done or want to see a specialist, but because I'm relatively fit, healthy, with no family history of anything "bad", they say my risk of things is low. I don't care. I just want peace of mind. Cost isn't even an issue, I would be willing to pay a decent sum to get regular screenings so I'm not blindsided with some stage 4 diagnosis down the road.

[dv_dt]

BTW The American Cancer Society recommends colonoscopy screenings starting at age 45 routinely now if there are not other indicators to start even earlier.

https://www.cancer.org/cancer/types/colon-rectal-cancer/dete...

[caeril]

Is it doctors, or is it medical administrations reluctant to deal with "selling" your insurance provider on covering you for a service?

At least in the US, I've found that if you're paying cash up-front, you can shop around for what you want, without referrals, and without this kind of hesitation.

[cracrecry]

Doesn't make sense at all to have 30 something people with cancer, but we see more and more, although the treatment improves.

My personal opinion is mandated flame retardants in foams, mattresses and cushions and other plastics. Smokers die less from fire but everybody else breath poison.

[timr]

Young people have always had cancer at some rate, which is why anecdotes here are not particularly indicative. However rare and tragic, it's not unheard of.

That said, the pop media (of which Scientific American is part) routinely conflates rates of diagnosis with rates of late-stage cancer, even though they're very different, and there's a discrepancy between them. I don't know about colon cancer in particular, but I know that it's been a long-term trend in many different cancers -- for example (iirc) skin cancer -- that people are getting diagnosed far more often, but death rates due to the illness are essentially constant.

This tells you either that we're getting worse at treating what we diagnose, or more plausibly, that we're not detecting things that would lead to death.

[moritzwarhier]

How did you come to this conclusion?

Why not microplastics, fine particle pollution, noise (urban living around lots of cars and/or heavy industry), mental stress, lack of sleep, lack of healthy connections, lack of time outdoors and healthy exercise, and similar things?

Seems weird to me to pick one arbitrary class of chemicals when all of the things I listed have been worsening.

[fransje26]

> microplastics, fine particle pollution, noise [..], mental stress, lack of sleep, lack of healthy connections

[..] pesticides, GMOs, the flood of chemicals approved for everyday use, ranging from "soaps" to perfumes, to indoor "purifiers" etc, ultra-processed foods, and the list goes on.

[cancerboi]

30 y/o male with stage 3c testicular cancer. Diagnosis at age 29.

I have a very rare type of cancer and this particular type of cancer has increased in numbers for young men.

[jlcx]

3c here as well. The doctors were surprised that it had spread to my bones, and it didn’t show up on the CT scans that they were using for surveillance.

[jakesgates]

What made you get it checked out initially?

[AnonMessiah]

I thankfully caught mine at stage 1 and had lefty removed just after turning 22

[lambdaba]

For you and other people in this thread dealing with this, I humbly offer Dr. Thomas Seyfried's work on the metabolic treatment of cancer [1]. I think it's important to at least give his ideas a look, there are many interviews of him on YouTube that are a good start.

[1] https://www.bc.edu/bc-web/schools/morrissey/departments/biol...

[manmal]

How is your circadian rhythm? In bed before 10, low lights at night, bright light in the morning? Some interesting observational studies around circadian rhythm in colorectal, as you may have seen already.

[candiddevmike]

Mind sharing where you grew up?

[hypeatei]

Yeah, my personal theory is that plastics and PFAS are going to be the "things we did wrong for too long" for millenials / Gen Z.

[nielsbot]

Just like leaded paint before... and perhaps all (fossil fuel) pollution too.

I think the ultimate lesson will be "we're one with the environment, not, in fact, a separate entity from it".

[hypeatei]

Exactly. I was alluding to things like lead and asbestos. Could've been more clear.

[zo1]

Agreed. We simply have been functioning off the premise that what we do has no impact. But we are in the billions now and most of what we do we do at a huge and unimaginable scale.

Nature could, before, take time to heal and "absorb" everything we threw it's way. Time was the ultimate healer.

We no longer have that option and we simply must stop the third world from progressing. If you all thought it was bad with the small 1st world population damaging the env, you can't even fathom the scale and sheer trash the third world billions will generate in the coming decades whilst they "come out of poverty and industrialization".

[hosh]

What’s the cancer rate for young people in third world countries?

How much of the quality of life in first world countries depend on third world countries?

[zo1]

All the more reason why we should be uplifting the third world. Instead of allowing them to proliferate their own suffering using debt and population booms.

[hosh]

Wouldn't that be imposing cultural values of the first world on developing countries?

What makes us sure that modernity as it is now is that much better? I'm not entirely convinced that is the case, and there are many problems that result from problems inherent to modernity.

For example, this happens, a lot: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-call...

Given the mental health crises in the first world from our youth, I think the first world is far, far from figuring everything out, including problems with suffering.

As far as debt, isn't that a first world problem saddled onto the third world?

Finally, as a thought experiment, if an alien species from outer space came down here and wanted to uplift America, would Americans want it? I bet you, people would not take it well. There's a presumption of cultural and technological superiority that will chafe everyone. I've seen memes comparing Star Trek as an ideal of where we can go as a civilization, and yet, Star Trek also talks about the Prime Directive, not uplifting ... unless violating it generate enough drama to have an interesting plot.

[ein0p]

Then GenX would be full of cancer of all sorts. Pesticides, plastics, pollution - you name it, it was way worse back then.

[paulnpace]

This doesn't correlate with my lived experience. I remember almost everything except yogurt and milk coming in glass containers. My family and friends strongly preferred soda from bottles than cans, and we were lower middle class and we didn't use plastic 2 liters very often. (And several families drank raw milk - I know, the horror).

Nearly the entire condiments aisle is now filled with soybean oil where it nearly didn't exist before. And it was a really big deal when McDonald's went away from using animal fat to cook fries in. Now pretty much nothing is cooked in oil from animal fat. This is certainly a change from pretty much the entire history of human food.

Various researchers are pointing out that glyphosate covers nearly the entire surface of the Earth and is found in nearly everything, including clothing and linens. It was not nearly as widespread in the '70s and '80s.

Exposure to various radio and now microwave (5G) frequencies was practically zero compared to what we began being exposed to in the '90s and is now pretty much everywhere.

Personally, I draw the major distinctions in video game technologies with the PlayStation and another later with Xbox Live! (the latter was really most popular with the Xbox 360). Previous technologies we would fairly quickly hit a point where it just got boring so we would go outside and play, most especially pre-NES. While more of a behavior factor, it is very important on pretty much every level except diet that we engaged in physical activity, social interaction, and sunlight.

As a side note, when I've tried to research it I've found that Gen X is experiencing a higher mortality rate than previous generations in pretty much every category. This correlates with my lived experience.

[ein0p]

Glyphosate is far less harmful than any herbicide that was in use before it. That’s why researchers have such a hard time linking it to diseases except in farmers who spray literal metric tons of the stuff. But glyphosate is a red herring - the real nasty shit that is harmful are not herbicides, but pesticides. And what was in use in 70s and 80s is nightmare fuel.

[paulnpace]

That "nasty shit" wasn't in my sheets and underwear and didn't coat the surface of the Earth. The issues related to claims can be equally attributed to the massive funding of even journals, themselves, plus a nearly unlimited budget to fight everything in courts and out-of-court settlements with gag orders - nearly every dirty trick a corporation can do has been done to protect the producers of glyphosate.

[JumpCrisscross]

> nearly every dirty trick a corporation can do has been done to protect the producers of glyphosate

Glyphosate is perfectly safe, we just don’t have a scientifically literate population. The nasty stuff in Roundup are the surfactants.

[francisofascii]

Yikes. How did you find out? Did you notice a drop in your energy levels? Stomach cramps?

[ronnier]

I hope things are looking better and for you and a full recovery.

[lovethevoid]

Unlike the general trend which is that obesity is the primary cause, for your case it might be a combination of elevated stress and your triathlon work. If you were not working with a professional on your recovery and prevention, it might be possible the elevated intensity for longer periods could have affected your health.

Note there aren't any studies specifically about triathletes, only that with proper training, diet, and prevention as most higher level athletes get (uni, olympian, etc), there's no serious risk of DNA damage. Also short course triathletes face more risks generally speaking, at least for cardiac and gastrointestinal issues (not all being chronic, so there's no direct link to cancer here either).

Sleep issues are another area usually ignored since people believe they can't do anything about their sleep issues. I doubt most people are even getting good sleep, in the current ecosystem of always being available.

Additionally, due to the general availability of office work, more people are suffering from gastrointestinal issues than before. This causes us to be sedentary for long periods of time, but we believe ourselves to be "active" because we go for a run on the treadmill. I wouldn't say this really applies to you as a lifelong athlete, only that these extremes (sitting for hours, then rapid exercise, then back to sitting for hours) likely has unintended consequences.

Just some ideas.