A disposable camera that’s small enough to swallow and powerful enough to help rule out bowel cancer. And it could be coming to a clinic near you. Last month, NHS England announced a pilot programme that will offer some people with potential bowel cancer symptoms a colon capsule endoscopy, instead of the more invasive colonoscopy test. It’s a small pilot at the moment, with 40 centres signed up and 11,000 pill cameras available. And it’s not the first. A team in Scotland has been investigating this tiny technology since 2018, with hospitals in some parts of Scotland beginning to use the test ..read more

This post was first published in 2019, but has been reviewed and updated in March 2021. It’s not new news that processed and red meat are linked to bowel cancer. But in 2019, Cancer Research UK scientists took a closer look at how much meat might be enough to increase bowel cancer risk. The study, published in the International Journal of Epidemiology, looked at whether people who eat an average of 76 grams of processed and red meat a day – approximately 3 slices of ham – are still at increased risk of bowel cancer. This is similar to the average amount people in the UK eat each day, and fall ..read more

This week, NHS England began to inform people that one of the bowel screening tests – bowel scope – will no longer be a part of the bowel screening programme in England. The test, which uses a thin, flexible tube with a small camera and light at the end of it to look inside the lower part of the bowel, aims to find early-stage cancers that aren’t yet causing any symptoms. And in a trial we part funded, the test prevented more than half of the potential bowel cancers from developing in the bowel and reduced the risk of dying from these cancers by two thirds in people who were screened. Based o ..read more

Sheltering in our gut is a collection of trillions of bacteria, fungi and viruses that call the human body home – making up a large proportion of our microbiome. The vibrant community of bugs can help protect us from harm, programming our immune system as well as providing nutrients for our cells. But certain bacteria have been linked to a host of different diseases, from diabetes and mental health to cancer. Clues from both the lab and clinic have suggested a link between the microbiome and bowel cancer. But there’s still a lot we don’t know. According to Jens Puschhof, a PhD student at the ..read more

It’s a substance most people try not to think about. But it could be a vital tool when it comes to detecting bowel cancer early. We need to talk about poo. In diagnosing some cancers, poo has a particular advantage. Professor Chris Probert, a Cancer Research UK-funded bowel cancer expert at the University of Liverpool, explains why it’s such an important tool. “For bowel cancer, where in the body is the action happening? It’s in the gut. And where are those chemicals that we want to detect most likely to go? In the stool.” Current tests for bowel cancer screening already take advantage of thi ..read more

Bowel cancer rates are increasing in adults aged between 20 and 50, according to data from 2 big studies published this week. Both studies looked at large numbers of people across several countries, including the UK, providing strong evidence on the number of people developing bowel cancer. And some worrying trends emerged. In the UK, bowel cancer cases increased on average by up to 7.3% each year in 30 to 39 year olds between 2005 and 2014, according to figures published by the International Cancer Benchmarking Partnership, which is part funded by Cancer Research UK. But it’s important to pu ..read more

Cora Olpe is a PhD student at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge institute, working with Dr Doug Winton. She’s interested in how gut stem cells acquire faults over time and how these spread to generate large mutated areas, which could promote cancer. In this guest post, she writes about her lab’s work to uncover how bowel cancer develops. The human bowel is a long tube coated in a single layer of cells, which bunches up and forms pockets called crypts. This single layer of cells is exposed to a lot throughout the day and dead cells are constantly being removed from the body and replaced, thanks ..read more

It’s time to welcome a new batch of researchers to the Cancer Research UK team. Here are some common themes they are researching, and how their work could help cancer patients in the future. Targeting the faulty genetics of cancer Dr Serena Nik-Zainal is exploring patterns of faults in DNA from cancer cells called signatures. This will help her understand how DNA is damaged inside cells, and how it’s repaired to help cells survive, which can lead to cancer. Meanwhile, Dr Andrew Beggs, Dr Ross Carruthers, Dr Laureano de la Vega, and Dr Luca Magnani, are looking at the genetic changes that can ..read more

Surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy are the mainstays of cancer treatment. So it’s surprising that, despite decades of use, it has been impossible to answer this seemingly simple question: which patients are getting which types of treatment? New data, out today, starts to give us some answers. In a world-first, the National Cancer Registration and Analysis Service (NCRAS), in partnership with Cancer Research UK, have used data from England to see which treatments are being used across all types of cancer, for the whole population. And it shows that generally patients diagnosed an earlier s ..read more

Eating plenty of wholegrains cuts your risk of bowel cancer, according to a new report. And it seems we can reap the benefits without making wild changes to our diets (unless your diet is mainly hot dogs and fry-ups). The news comes from a report produced by the World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF) and the American Institute for Cancer Research (AICR), outlining the latest evidence on how we can reduce our risk of bowel cancer. It focusses on the effects of diet, weight, physical activity and alcohol on bowel cancer risk. And with bowel cancer being the fourth most common cancer in the UK, findi ..read more