The Changing Face Of Cancer

While cancer rates are falling in older adults, they're increasing among younger age groups. It's a trend exposing holes in both diagnosis and care. It's also raised a new question for experts: how do you get vital and potentially life-saving information to people unaware they need it?

- ELLE HUNT

Looking back, all the signs were there: fatigue, lower back pain, blood in his stool. But back then, in late 2022, Dan Ridge could explain them all. He was tired because he stayed up late. His back hurt because he had a tricky bowel and was often constipated. Even on the persistent blood in his stool, Google was reassuring, suggesting it could be stress.

At the time, Dan was in full-time work and the father of two young boys; he'd also just finished planning his wedding and recently buried his fatherin-law. "Doctor Google said it was stress, so I thought that must be it," he says.

After all, Dan was still young. "If I'd been over 60 and noticing blood in my stool, maybe I would have thought a bit differently," he says. "But I was only 38." A few months later, early in 2023, Dan's nineyear-old son brought home a new hoverboard. Dan stepped up to give it a go-and fell off, hard, injuring his back and neck. He joked with his family that it was an "epic dad fail"--but it ended up saving his life.

When Dan went to make a physio appointment, the online self-referral survey flagged the abnormalities in his bowel habit and forwarded them to his GP. By then, he was using the toilet more than 10 times a day, sometimes for 30 minutes at a time.

When his GP got in touch to organise a prostate exam and stool checks, cancer was floated among a wide range of possible causes, including Crohn's disease and IBS (irritable bowel syndrome). Dan wasn't too worried; again, he had youth on his side.

But the diagnosis was swift and unambiguous: Dan had bowel cancer. "They couldn't even complete the colonoscopy because the growth was so big." he says, still sounding disbelieving, "I didn't think my symptoms were serious enough for it to be cancer --and I still thought I was too young to be getting it."