Medical mailbox
Care for Your Colon
By Cory SerVaas, M.D.
Published: March/April 2001
My mother died of colon cancer. I was attending a meeting in New York when the fateful call came. "I have a pink stool, and the doctor says I have an apple-core lesion in my colon," she told me in a plaintive voice from Iowa. I was incredulous and devastated. To a doctor, an apple-core lesion means that the colon is constricted, looking like an apple core from the ominous growth of cancer in the muscular lining of the colon. We had tested her every four months for hidden blood in the stool with a test from Miles Laboratories. My sorrow turned to dismay when I learned that consuming vitamin C would invalidate the results, but that no such information had appeared in the product literature. The test had given us a false sense of security because my mother was currently on a very generous regimen of vitamin C, our favorite antioxidant at the time. I'm sure our correspondence and phone calls helped persuade the company to immediately put the warning on its labels. The revised product inserts now call attention to the false-negative stool tests due to vitamin C and advise physicians and consumers of dietary restrictions required to obtain the most accurate results (see below). My mother had wanted "ten more good years," but that year we went to her engagement party in the spring, her wedding in the summer, and her funeral at Christmastime. My grief worsened in the knowledge that had flexible colonoscopies been available only a few years earlier, while her cancer was growing, she might have been spared an untimely death. Today, there certainly aren't enough gastroenterologists or physicians to perform lifesaving colonoscopies on all persons over 40! I wish colon care could become as important and as available as automobile checkups. Then we could truly wipe out most colon cancers by early detection. We could nip the polyps in the bud, as was done for President Reagan. In the meantime, if you must rely on routine checks for occult blood in the stool, heed the fine print on the test kit.
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