By now, you may have heard Dr. Mehmet Oz had a routine colonoscopy starting at age 50 that found a pre-cancerous polyp.
He told USA Today, “I don’t want people thinking ‘Oz did everything right and he still got a polyp, so what’s the point?’ Part of doing everything right is getting screened.”
And that’s the message our Siteman Cancer Center tries to give out as well. At age 50, like Dr. Oz, you need to have a screening colonoscopy to prevent colorectal cancer.
“We now know if you can get the colon cancer as a polyp — which is the little growth in the lining of the colon — before it becomes a cancer, you can stop colon cancer and cure it before it even happens,” says Jim Fleshman, MD, chief of colorectal surgery at the Siteman Cancer Center at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and Washington University School of Medicine. “We think colonoscopy is the way to go in terms of screening and also treating colon cancer at an early stage.”
The American Cancer Society has varying guidelines about when you should get screened. In fact, if you have a family history, you should get screened earlier.
That’s what happened in my case. I was 30 when my physician recommended that due to an issue I was having, I get a screening colonoscopy due to family history. While the issue I was sent in for didn’t show anything, the colonoscopy did find an unrelated pre-cancerous polyp at age 30 — again, family history. Now, let’s say I had waited even until the standard age 50 and that pre-cancerous polyp had the opportunity to develop for 20 years. I could have faced a very uncomfortable future.
Long story short, talk to your doctor about colon cancer and getting screened. It’s a simple, painless test and it could save your life.
You can find out more on prevention in this video interview I did with Dr. Fleshman a couple of years ago.
-Jason Merrill
Kristin Hall
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