For how we live.
Most bowel symptoms are not cancer. But a 2023 study of early-onset cases identified four signs — rectal bleeding, abdominal pain, diarrhoea and iron-deficiency anaemia — that recur before diagnosis in the under-50s.
A cohort of 5.24 million UK adults linked higher BMI to 17 of 22 cancers — strongly for the uterus, weakly or not at all for others, and inversely for a couple. The pattern is specific, not uniform.
Registries show a real but narrow signal: a few cancers, led by prostate and thyroid, run high in 9/11 responders, while overall cancer incidence sits at or below the rate expected.
It is the most common cancer in young men and incidence keeps climbing, but deaths are a small fraction of cases — and major guidelines advise against routine screening or self-exam in men without symptoms.
A stool test at home and a colonoscopy are both recommended options with different trade-offs. The starting age fell to 45 because the disease is rising in younger adults.
A linked-registry cohort of New South Wales residents from 2001 to 2018 finds cancer risk in people with intellectual disability inverts with age — higher when young, lower after 50.
Age-standardised incidence was 42.3 per 100,000 in Ghana and 43.1 in US non-Hispanic Black women, against 24.0 in white women. ER-positive rates diverged sharply in the other direction.