'Stiff' Bowels May Explain Young People's Higher Cancer Risk

Recent research showed that almost half of bowel cancer cases happen among under-65s. 

It wasn’t always that way. Since the ’80s, doctors have noticed that over-50s are getting the condition less, while younger people are seeing more and more cases. 

We aren’t sure exactly why that is, though some doctors have shared some possible causes, like “ultra-processed diets, sedentary behaviour, stress, and disrupted sleep”, with HuffPost UK previously. 

But now, bioengineers from the University of Texas, Dallas, have found a “distinctive feature of tissues from young patients diagnosed with colorectal [bowel] cancer, a disease that typically affects older patients”.

Are young people’s bowels different to older people’s?

This research, published in the journal Advanced Science, found that a lot of younger people’s colon tissue is “stiffer” than their older counterparts’.

This was true regardless of whether the tissue itself had bowel cancer, though all participants had been diagnosed with either early-onset bowel cancer (under 50s; 14 patients) or average-onset bowel cancer (over 50s; 19 patients).

The colon is a tube-shaped part of the digestive system that uses some muscles to push stool out of your body. But sometimes, it’s “extracellular material”, which is a kind of mesh made from collagen, thickens ― e.g., when it’s inflamed.

Study author Dr Jacopo Ferruzzi said: “Our team brought an engineering mindset to the table to understand the physical mechanisms involved in early-onset colorectal cancer... We know from previous studies that cancers are usually stiffer than normal tissues.

“While this was true also in patients with early-onset colorectal cancer, we were surprised to find that both healthy and cancerous tissues from these younger patients were stiffer than those from older patients.

“This led our team to think that such stiffness could be creating a favourable environment for cancer to develop early in life.”

What does that mean? 

The researchers hope it could help us to provide better treatment for people with bowel cancer, especially younger people, down the line. 

“If we can understand how physical forces fuel colorectal cancer progression, then we can actually think about early diagnosis and, possibly, therapy,” Dr Ferruzzi said.

“More importantly, we can ask the question: How do we stop people from developing cancer that early in life?”