Colon Cancer, What is the Tumor That Affected Totò Schillaci?

The colon cancer that struck Totò Schillaci a couple of years agothe unforgettable top scorer of the ‘magic nights’ of Italia ’90, now hospitalized and struggling with the disease again, “is the second most frequent tumor and is among the first in both males and females. A neoplasm that we must take into consideration”. A picture drawn up for Adnkronos Salute is Maurizio Vecchi, professor of gastroenterology at the University of Milan and director of Gastroenterology and Endoscopy at the Policlinico of the Lombardy capital.

The data speaks for itself: according to the estimates that are released every year in the report ‘Cancer numbers’, in 2023, new diagnoses of colorectal cancer were approximately 50 thousanda number second only to new cases of breast cancer (about 55,900). “A high frequency,” observes the expert. But this tumor also has another characteristic: “If caught in the very early stages, it can be completely eradicated and have an excellent prognosis for life, with a 5-year survival rate of over 90%.”

For this reason, Vecchi continues, “it is really important to adhere to the screening” provided for this disease. “Unfortunately, this concept is not yet very widespread among the general population, because only 30-40% of people adhere to this type of program. It is certainly an unsatisfactory rate, very low”. And there is another alert that is opening new evaluations: “Unfortunately Lately, a higher frequency of cases of colon cancer has been reported even at an age not previously expected“, among younger people. “So much so that it is being considered to lower the age of starting screening to 45”. If this tumor is diagnosed late, “when it is already very extensive and when distant metastases are present, at that point the 5-year survival rate is low”. This is why this neoplasm is “the ideal target for a screening program, which in this case includes once every two years, starting from the age of 50, the invitation to collect a test tube from the pharmacy for the fecal occult blood testand perform the test, bringing the sample back to the pharmacy, all this free of charge”.

If the occult blood test is positive, “the patient is always invited free of charge to undergo the second level test, which is the colonoscopy. Obviously, in this phase, compliance is much higher. Colon cancer is a tumor that we must deal with, also because the prevention programs in this case they are really aimed not only at making an early diagnosis of a tumor already in progress, but also at finding even the adenomatous polyps of the colon, which are the typical ‘precursor’ of carcinoma, and can be removed during colonoscopy, starting from scratch a path that had already begun towards colon cancer. This is the only field in which we do real prevention, because we are going to remove a lesion that is not yet a tumor, but that will become one”.