Welcome back to the Barbell Medicine podcast where we bring modern medicine to strength conditioning and strength the conditioning to modern medicine.

I'm your host, Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum. And this is two doctors answering the internet.

Next question, back to the medicine side here. Why is there such a large rise in colon cancer?

All right. So let me give people a lay of the land and then I'll pose the question directly to you.

So in the United States, there's approximately 150,000 new cases of large bowel cancer every

year.

So that's just your large colon.

Annually, about 50,000 people die from colorectal cancer in the United States.

And their lifetime incidence of colorectal cancer is about 4%.

In the United States, colorectal cancer incidence rates have been declining by approximately 2% per year,

but this rate of decline has slowed to approximately 1.2% per year in the period from 2014 to 2018.

So it's been going down, but then as of late, it's been going down less.

And notably, in the United States, the declining mortality overall is masking trends in younger

adults. So colorectal mortality rates per 100,000 people in the population, amongst individuals

aged less than 50, have declined by about 2% per year from 2000 and 2004,

but then after that has been increasing by about 1% through 2018.

So things have been going down for like years and years and years.

And now as of late, they've been going up, especially in people under the age of 50.

So overall, the incidence of colorectal cancer is increasing in individuals under the age of 50

while it is decreasing in older individuals in the United States and Western countries.

So with that lay the land out of the way, Dr. Baraki, why is there such a large rise in

colon cancer in younger people?

...