David Friedberg

Yeah.

Well, and make racism again.

Surprise science corner.

Yeah, this is not necessarily a big surprise, but there was a really interesting paper published this week

on trying to elucidate the underlying cause or predictor of colorectal cancer.

So I don't know if you guys know any young friends, but colorectal cancer, Nick, if you could just pull up this first image, or colon cancer has become now the third leading cancer.

Over the last 20 years or so, there's been a scary rise in the number of young people, people generally under 50 years old that are getting colon cancer.

That number has climbed by,

over 80% in just the last two decades.

Historically, it's been an age-related disease.

So as you get older, over 70 years old, your probability of getting colon cancer shoots through the roof.

But this rise in young people getting colon cancer has been pretty alarming.

And there's been a real question mark on what is causing it.

What's the underlying cause?

trigger.

So this research team out of Barcelona in Spain did an amazing study where they looked at the difference in the epigenome or the gene expression in tumor cells

of patients that are under 50 years old and those that are over 70 years old.

This sort of data will show you what different environmental triggers are associated with those changes in gene expression.

So whenever we're exposed to something in the environment, whether it's some food or some drink or whatever else it is, some chemical in the environment, the cells in our body that are exposed to that chemistry or exposed to that environmental trigger,

have genes that get switched on and off.