Physicians should follow hereditary colorectal cancer guidelines to prevent early-onset CRC in at-risk patients, according to research from the Ohio Colorectal Cancer Prevention Initiative, CURE reports.
Researchers studied 3,319 patients with a primary invasive colorectal adenocarcinoma with surgical resection. Exactly 450 patients were under 50. Researchers separated the patients by groups. Group one had 56 patients with deficient mismatch repair disease and group two had 402 patients with proficient mismatch repair disease as well as one patient with hypermethylated CRC.
What you should know:
1. Clinicians could've prevented early-onset CRC in 44 percent of patients if they had learned family history and increased diagnostic screening rates.
2. Researchers had 718 patients who had been diagnosed with CRC before the age of 50. Of those patients, 148 were high-risk individuals, 83 had a pathogenic variant and 98 had a first-degree relative with colon cancer.
3. In the hereditary CRC group, 82 patients would have started screening prior to diagnosis. Earlier screening would have prevented 79 cases and physicians would've caught three cases at an earlier stage.
4. In the family history group, 53 patients would've began screening prior to diagnosis. Earlier screening would have prevented 37 cases, and physicians could've caught 16 cases at an earlier stage.
Researchers said if physicians screened patients with a family history beginning at age 35, 51 patients would have prevented their disease, six patients would've begun surveillance within five years of their diagnosis, and 60 patients could've prevented or down-staged their CRC.