In medical news, there are around 1400 new cases of colorectal cancer diagnosed in Kentucky each year, with the state consistently ranking among the highest in the nation when it comes to colorectal cancer deaths.

A new law that went into effect January 1st aims to lower the number of those deaths by getting more people screened at an earlier age.

An expert at the University of Louisville Health talks about the change in the guidelines.

So in 2025, the screening age for people who are not at high risk for colon cancer was age 45.

That guideline is actually still the same.

If you have no family history of colon cancer or polyps, you don't have inflammatory bowel disease, or you don't have a genetic syndrome, it is still 45.

What is changed that's new is now.

Any family history of advanced or large polyps is now considered also to be equivalent to cancer.

So if you have any first degree like mom, dad, brothers, sisters that had an adenoma or a large polyp that now counts as a cancer, and so they've moved the screening guidelines down to 40 for patients like that.

So a polyp is basically it's a little abnormal growth in the colon.

When it first starts it's just an extra accumulation of normal cells.

But over time all cells in the body are dividing.

And so when you have an extra growth of, you know, kind of energetic cells, if you will, as they as those cells continue to grow, you can get mutations that can lead to a cancer.

So if you have polyps, that's okay.

As long as you get them removed so that they don't have the chance to turn into a cancer, for a polyp to turn into a cancer, there is one pathway that takes ten years.

But since that pathway has been discovered, we have found two other genetic alterations that happen in a pile up to turn into a cancer that we don't know that much about.

There are sessile, serrated lesions.

There are things on that are kind of newer polyps that we're just learning about.

We don't know how quickly they take to turn into a cancer, but the screening recommendation on those is even tighter.

So we think that it's much faster than ten years.

It could be, you know, 2 to 3 years by far and away.

Rectal bleeding was the number one symptom that kind of portended a cancer diagnosis.

Aside from rectal bleeding, a lot of times if people are passing really thin stool or if they're constipated and they feel like they need to go, but nothing is coming out, that's another symptom where we would try to say, let's go ahead and get a colonoscopy.

Those are really the two biggest warning signs to look out for.

About 30 to 40% of colon cancers are due to what we say, modifiable risk factors.

So things that you and I can change.

Obesity, physical activity, smoking, alcohol and eating, a lot of red meat.

Those are kind of the the five definite things.

It really can put you at risk for colon cancer and actually account for more causes of colon cancer than genetics.