Colonoscopies aren't that bad. Personally, the Doc found some adenomas to snip out, so a colonoscopy may have saved my life. And prevented/delayed a painful death.Study Says Colon Test Saves Lives
By RON WINSLOW
A major new study found that colonoscopies save lives, providing a long-missing piece of evidence to support one of medicine's least popular preventive tests.
In the study, which involved 2,602 patients, researchers at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, found that undergoing a colonoscopy in which tiny growths in the intestine called polyps were removed resulted in a 53% reduction in risk of death from colon cancer.
Cancer-prevention guidelines long have called for people to have a colonoscopy at age 50. In the test, a camera is threaded into the intestine at the end of a tube to check for suspicious polyps. If the first test is normal and there isn't family history of colon cancer, additional tests are recommended every 10 years. Other screening tests for colon cancer include stool tests and a sigmoidoscopy, which is similar to a colonoscopy but doesn't examine as much of the intestine.
Previous research has shown that removing suspicious polyps, especially those known as adenomas, prevents cancer, but whether that results in a reduction in death hasn't previously been demonstrated in a rigorous study. The new study "confirms what we've suspected and what we've done in practice," said Eric Esrailian, vice chief of digestive diseases at University of California at Los Angeles Medical Center. "It reinforces the importance of colorectal cancer screening."
In the study, researchers tracked patients who underwent a colonoscopy between 1980 and 1990 and had polyps removed. After a median follow-up of nearly 16 years, 1,246 patients had died from any cause, including 12 who had died from colon cancer. Other studies indicated that 25.4 colon-cancer deaths would have been expected among 2,602 people in the general population, leading to the conclusion of a 53% reduction in mortality.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... olonoscopy
Colon cancer sucks. Don't risk it.