The singer with colon cancer died on Saturday August 6. What is this disease and how to detect it?
- Colorectal cancer (or colon and rectal cancers) is a cancer of the large intestine that can be cured if detected early.
- Except in the case of a family history, colorectal cancer should be considered from the age of 50, when the risk begins to increase.
The singer Daniel Lévi, famous interpreter of “The desire to love” in the musical “The Ten Commandments” died this Saturday August 6 from colon cancer.
This pathology develops from polyps, small precancerous lesions that form on the intestinal wall.
17,117 deaths
It is a very deadly cancer which represents the second leading cause of death by cancer of all sexes combined with 43,336 new cases and 17,117 deaths per year, according to French Public Health.
In 2019, Daniel Lévi told about Voltage how he had discovered and experienced the disease. “There were analyses, with signs that were there a year before, that I didn’t take seriously, because it stopped“, he recalled.
And indeed, the signs of cancer of the rectum and colon can be multiple: iron deficiency, bleeding, abdominal pain, transit disorders and/or a deterioration in general condition.
90%
However detected at an early stage, colon cancer has an excellent prognosis since it has an overall survival rate of 90% at 5 years against 13% at a metastatic stage.
This is why the French health authorities have set up since 2010 an organized screening program for colorectal cancer for people over 50, who represent 95% of cases.
The program consists in carrying out every two years at home a test for occult blood (not visible to the naked eye, editor’s note) in the stool which makes it possible to detect precancerous lesions and tumors.
If the result is positive and confirms the presence of blood in the stool, this does not mean the diagnosis of colorectal cancer. A colonoscopy with a gastroenterologist will be needed to find out what is causing this bleeding.
Diagnostic accuracy
It is indeed colonoscopy which allows the screening of colon cancer but this technique still has limits: it does not make it possible to detect and diagnose subsurface lesions (just below the surface, editor’s note).
Recently, researchers have developed a colorectal cancer imaging tool that could ultimately improve the traditional endoscopy currently used by physicians.
Shuying Li, a doctoral student in biomedical engineering, used the imaging data to train a machine learning algorithm to differentiate “normal” tissue from “cancerous” tissue.
The combined system has enabled scientists to detect and classify samples of cancerous tissue with a diagnostic accuracy of 93% which could, in the future, constitute a real breakthrough in the fight against this cancer.
