Cara Santamaria

And of course, we've seen a massive change to cervical cancer screening due to the HPV vaccine.

When I was young, you started your pap as early as you were kind of sexually active.

uh or as early as you had a period and you would go every single year and now uh most uh girls and young women's are going through every three to five years and they're they're ending those pap tests at a certain age okay so these are the three that are spoken about here and i guess we'll dive in with the colonoscopy question what are the risks of undergoing colonoscopy you can um

Yeah, you could get an infection.

I mean, it's rare, but there could be a perforation.

And definitely, anesthesia does carry risks.

And so the older the individual is and the more their health concerns and complaints, those risks can become more salient.

And then the question is, if we were to screen every single person in their mid-80s, how many of them would probably have...

have something pop up on a colonoscopy that you know historically might warrant treatment well here's some interesting numbers there's a new study of 92 000 veterans affairs patients that showed um

You know, there were patients over 75 who had previously had colonoscopies.

And they found that in that group of older adults who had colonoscopies, in about 28%, they found an adenoma, which is a polyp that could become cancerous.

And then they followed them for 10 years.

They found that those who had an adenoma on colonoscopy were...

were more likely... At 75?

Yeah, over 75, were more likely to develop colon cancer than those without one.

But here's the rub.

In 0.5% of individuals with a previous adenoma, they ended up dying of colon cancer.

Those without a previous adenoma who ended up dying of colon cancer...

0.5 versus 0.4% of that population.

And so obviously both groups were completely outnumbersed by the number of veterans who died within the decade of other causes.