Rates of colorectal cancer are on the rise among young adults, a trend that continues to puzzle oncologists. Deepak Vadehra, DO, Director of the Early Onset Colorectal Cancer Program at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, discusses some of the symptoms that might be easily dismissed as hemorrhoids or other conditions when, in fact, they are early indicators for colorectal cancer.
My name is Deepak Fodera. I'm a medical oncologist here at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center. I'm a GI medical oncologist, which means I treat cancer to the GI tract. I primarily treat colorectal and anal cancers here at Roswell Park. I am the director of the Early onset Colorectal program here. I co-lead both the GI Cancer Translational group and the AYA or adolescent Young Adult Translational Research Group. I'm here today to talk about early onset colorectal cancer and how we at Roswell Park approached the care and management of the unfortunate rising number of these patients that we see at our center. We define early onset typically as those who are diagnosed with colorectal cancer less than 50 years of age. Young people need to be aware that symptoms that aren't going away are very. Important to have checked out whether it's bleeding from the rectum, do not assume it's just hemorrhoids, abdominal pain, cramping that's not going away for a few weeks, changes in their bowel habits one way or the other, whether you're having more looser stools, diarrhea, whether feeling more constipated or just unintentional weight loss. The unfortunate answer is that no one is too young to get cancer. And that's a very humbling thing I've learned over the past few years. So at Roswell Park, we offer a pretty comprehensive program to make sure that our early onset colorectal cancer patients get the services, care and support they need, most importantly. We have a dedicated program for AYAs that's typically 15 to 39 year olds, onco fertility services which can help with fertility. Preservation as a lot of the treatments we offer do affect fertility and uh ability to have children. We have social work, we have psychologists, we have a dedicated support, we have supported care physicians. There's a lot of things we do here that truly envelope the patient in multiple layers of support to help them through their journey. When I started here in the fall of 2021, you know, within the first two weeks, I would say. Is really when this problem really was very ever-present in my practice. Um, unfortunately, a 30 year old came in. They had had multiple delays, one because they lived in a more, a little bit more rural area, but they had rectal bleeding. They were told it was hemorrhoids. It wasn't getting better over time and so eventually they were found to have rectal cancer and then. We did imaging, they were found to have stage 4 rectal cancer. That to us means that, OK, we need to develop a care plan for them. So in concert with a surgical oncologist, we developed the aggressive chemotherapy plan for the patient, and he underwent what's called cytoreductive surgery with HPEC and that patient's done extremely well. after and right now is doing very well. We are the only center in this part of the country that offers cyber reduction with high pack capabilities, and we have a dedicated team of surgeons that offer that service to candidates for that procedure. We want to make sure that patients know that we are a center that has people who are dedicated to colon surgery, rectal surgery, people who are actively doing research in early onset colorectal cancer like myself and my team, my pharmacist, my nurse coordinator, my PA, we, we have a lot of experience in Taking care of early onset colorectal cancer patients, we offer clinical trials that other centers may not have access to, which expand the treatment options for patients. If you have patients who have concerning symptoms that are not resolving and you feel that they could benefit for the workup, we would be happy to help take care of the patients, and we welcome the opportunity to help work with you to help take care of this unfortunately rising patient population.
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