The content of this podcast is provided for general informational purposes only

and is not intended as, nor should it be considered a substitute for professional medical advice.

Hello everyone, welcome to sweaty and pissed.

Menopause and more, I'm Karen Nichol, Nurse Practitioner, and I'm here with Forest Wensel,

our producer and our theme music composer, and he's going to join me today to answer some

listener questions. Hello. Welcome to Be That. Hi. Yay. So good to have you.

Our first question is from Stephanie, who's asking if you can talk a little bit about the

Colaguard, and she's wondering who's a good candidate for the mail-in test.

Okay, that's a great question. Colaguard is a home stool test. It's a test you collect at home

from a stool sample, and it is a cancer screening, colon cancer screening test, and it is indicated

for people ages 45 and up, and it's only for people who have no risk. So no family history of

colon cancer, no personal history of colon cancer, no colon diseases like inflammatory bowel disease,

you're just a low-risk person with a normal colon who is screening for cancer. So that's the person

who can have this test. And it's very easy to collect the sample at home. It is a prescription,

so as a provider, I order the prescription, and then they ship you the kit directly to your home.

You collect the sample, and you ship the kit directly back to the lab. And then they send me the

result. And what it looks for, it's looking for blood in the stool for one thing, and it looks for

11 cancer biomarkers. And if you have a negative test, it's over 99% positive that you will not

have colon cancer, that you do not have colon cancer. So it's a very accurate test. They do have a

13% false positive rate, and what that means is if it's false positive, it means you get a positive,

but you really don't have colon cancer. They also have an 8% false negative rate, meaning

the test came back negative, and indeed you do have colon cancer. So there is that bit of risk when

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