Andreana Holowatyj, PhD, MSCI, Assistant Professor of Medicine and Cancer Biology at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center, studies the gastrointestinal cancer burdens in adults under the age of 50 and the health disparities of those diseases. She and her team have mapped out hotspots for younger adults with colon cancer and like many others is working to understand what’s going on.
Of those who get diagnosed with colorectal cancer, 1 in 10 are under the age of 50. And young men have worse survival rates than young women.
“To put that into perspective, for African-Americans about one in every eight African-Americans is diagnosed before age 50. I think that really illustrates that early onset course of cancer is not just one disease, that there are disparities, differences in patterns that could impact disease risk and outcomes that we continue to try and understand,” said Holowatyj. “There is a stigma associated with talking about colorectal cancer and that people sometimes think it’s a disease for older people and that it can’t impact young people. And that’s a really important and urgent stigma to break.”