Singapore Medical Guide | Singapore Healthcare

Colorectal cancer is now the number one cancer in Singapore. It has overtaken lung cancer in men and is already the cancer with the highest incidence in the general population. According to statistics from the Singapore Cancer registry 1998-2002, there have been 1048 deaths attributed to colon cancer and 469 deaths from rectal cancer. During this 5-year period, there were 6101 patients diagnosed with colorectal cancer, making up 15-18% of all cancers diagnosed during this period of time.

Am I at risk?

The following constitutes the main risk factors for colorectal cancer:
1. Age > 50 years
2. Family history of colorectal cancer
3. Family history of colorectal polyps
4. Personal history of inflammatory bowel disease
5. Past history of colon cancer or polyp

If you have none of these risk factors, your risk of being diagnosed with colorectal cancer is about 2%, or 1 in 50. This increases to 6% if you have one family member with colorectal cancer. It triples to 18% if you have 2 such family members affected and 50% if there are 3 such family members.

A common misconception is that we can wait till there are symptoms before seeing a doctor and getting tested. By the time symptoms appear, the cancer is usually already in its third or fourth stage of disease. The cure rate for third stage colorectal cancer is about 40-60%, while patients in the fourth stage are considered to have terminal illness and the chance of cure is almost zero. The real advantage is to pick up the cancer in its earliest stage one or two where the cure rate can approach 80-90%. Even better would be to pick-up polyps before they grow into cancer and remove them. To facilitate this early detection, one should get screened, even if we do not have any symptoms, once we attain the age of 50 years. This is because the risk of colorectal cancer rises exponentially after this age.