Agency lowers age for beginning colorectal screening to 45

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Cancer Digest -- May 21, 2021 -- With the recent rise in colorectal cancer cases in younger people the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF), has lowered its recommendation for colorectal cancer screening from age 50 to 45.

The agency published its new guideline in the May 18, 2021 issue of JAMA, re-aligning it with those of the American Cancer Society, which lowered the age for initial screening to 45 years in 2018.

Ovarian cancer screening fails to reduce deaths

CANCER DIGEST – May 15, 2021 – One of the largest trials ever conducted to screen women for ovarian cancer failed to reduce deaths from the disease, a new analysis shows.

The UK Collaborative Trial of Ovarian Cancer Screening followed more than 200,000 women ages 50 to 74 for an average of 16 years. A third of the women underwent no screening, a third underwent annual ultrasound screens and the final third underwent blood tests and ultrasound scans.

Sugary drinks linked to increased risk of early-onset colorectal cancer in young women

CANCER DIGEST – May 8, 2021 – Young women who drank two or more servings per day had just over twice the risk of being diagnosed with colorectal cancer before age 50 than those who drank much less, a new study finds.

The study led by Yin Cao, ScD, an associate professor of surgery and of medicine in the Division of Public Health Sciences at Washington University analyzed data from 41,000 participants in the Nurses' Health Study II, a large population study tracked the health of nearly 116,500 female nurses from 1991 to 2015. The study appears in the May 6 journal Gut.

T cell therapy effective against painful complication of stem cell transplants

Image credit MD Anderson

CANCER DIGEST – May 3, 2021 – An infusion of specific T cells from healthy donors were safe and effective as an off-the-shelf therapy for a common painful complication of allogeneic (donor) stem cell patients, a new clinical trial shows. The study appears in the April 30, 2021 Journal of Clinical Oncology.