Bowel Cancer Awareness
Are you soon to be 52? It is a big birthday as you will get your first NHS Bowel Cancer Screening kit in the post if you live in Bury, Oldham, Heywood, Middleton and Rochdale. It’s a simple test that could save your life. For more information about this little kit click here.
Bowel cancer is cancer that begins in the large bowel, which is made up of the colon and rectum. It’s sometimes called colorectal cancer.
What are the symptoms of bowel cancer?
Bowel cancer can affect anyone, whatever your age, gender, ethnicity or where you live.
Symptoms can include:
- bleeding from your bottom
- blood in your poo
- a change in your pooing habits. You might be going more or less often, or have diarrhoea or constipation that might come and go
- losing weight but you’re not sure why
- feeling very tired all the time but you’re not sure why
- a pain or lump in your tummy
Having these symptoms doesn’t always mean you have bowel cancer, but it’s still important to find out what’s causing them.
Bowel cancer screening
NHS bowel cancer screening checks if you could have bowel cancer. It's available to everyone aged 60 to 74 years.
The programme is expanding to make it available to everyone aged 50 to 59 years. This is happening gradually over 4 years and started in April 2021.
You use a home test kit, called a faecal immunochemical test (FIT), to collect a small sample of poo and send it to a lab. This is checked for tiny amounts of blood.
Blood can be a sign of polyps or bowel cancer. Polyps are growths in the bowel. They are not cancer, but may turn into cancer over time.
If the test finds anything unusual, you might be asked to go to hospital to have further tests to confirm or rule out cancer.
Always see a GP if you have symptoms of bowel cancer at any age, even if you have recently completed a NHS bowel cancer screening test kit – do not wait to have a screening test.
