Word: colonics
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Even when our own doctor tells us to get our colon checked, we don't always listen. A year and a half ago, Florence Seguin, 73, of Williamsburg, Va., shrugged off her physician's recommendation that she undergo a colonoscopy, a procedure in which a doctor inserts a flexible lighted tube into the colon to look for abnormal growths. A former nun and the adoptive mother of a 13-year-old boy, Seguin knew that one of her brothers had died of colon cancer, but it wasn't until she saw an article about Couric and Monahan that she stopped...
...serious about protecting yourself and your loved ones against colorectal cancer, it will help to know something about the disease. Nearly all colon cancers start as polyps, tiny grapelike projections that sprout on the inside of the large intestine. Most of the time these growths are benign, but occasionally a collection of cells--through a series of genetic mishaps--will get bigger and bigger until it turns into a tumor. About 25% of these malignant growths are triggered by a genetic predisposition that has been present since birth. The rest of the time, normal genes become damaged with...
Researchers have identified the genes responsible for at least two types of hereditary colon cancer--dubbed FAP and HNPCC --that trigger malignant growths in folks in their 30s and 40s. But it can be tough to tell who has the genes, since they are often camouflaged by normal ones. Last month Dr. Bert Vogelstein and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore, Md., reported in the journal Nature that they have figured out how to unmask the defective genes. Meanwhile, researchers at Exact Laboratories in Maynard, Mass., have developed a simple stool test that will alert your doctor...
Surgery is still the front line of defense against colon cancer, and it is highly effective against the smaller tumors. (Better techniques mean that less than 2% of all colorectal-cancer patients now undergo a colostomy, in which the large intestine is rerouted to a hole in the abdomen and emptied into a bag. That's down from as many as 20% two decades ago.) Larger or more aggressive tumors usually require chemotherapy, which can be a problem. Whereas breast cancer, for example, often succumbs to any of eight to 10 powerful drugs, there has until recently been only...
...there's good news on the chemotherapy front. In 1998 the Food and Drug Administration approved Camptosar (also called CPT-11) for the treatment of advanced stages of colon cancer, and using Camptosar and 5-FU in combination seems to be most effective. It's a potent cocktail that not all patients can tolerate, but it has, in some small studies, doubled short-term survival rates...