Large bowel cancer: an epidemiologic jigsaw puzzle

Abstract

The many fragments of available knowledge regarding cancer of the large bowel lie scattered like pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle awaiting assembly. If they could be correctly pieced together, the pattern emerging might well provide clues to the causation of this increasingly common tumor and lead to preventive measures that would save many lives and untold suffering. Epidemiologic evidence strongly suggests that bowel cancer (the 2nd most common cause of cancer death in the Western world after lung cancer) is very much dependent on man made environmental factors and therefore is potentially largely preventable.