Bowel cancer has long been thought of as a disease that mostly affects older people, but that’s changing fast. In Australia and around the world, a growing number of people under 50 are being diagnosed with bowel cancer, and researchers are racing to understand why.
Professor Michael Samuel, a leading cancer researcher at the University of South Australia and the Basil Hetzel Institute for Translational Health Research, is heading a major new investigation to tackle this mystery.
With funding of more than $573,000 from Bowel Cancer Australia and Cancer Australia, his team is launching a three-year project to find out what’s behind the rising number of early-onset cases and why so many younger patients relapse after treatment.
“We’ve made great progress in reducing deaths from bowel cancer thanks to better screening,” says Professor Samuel. “But we’re seeing more cases in younger adults, and we don’t know why. That’s something we urgently need to figure out.”
Recent data from the University of Melbourne reveals that people born in 1990 are up to three times more likely to develop bowel cancer than those born in 1950. Even more concerning is what happens after treatment.
About one in three people who have surgery to remove their bowel cancer later face a relapse. For those diagnosed before age 50, that number rises to one in two.
That unpredictability makes treatment and follow-up care difficult. Some patients endure intense, ongoing treatment and monitoring they may not need, while others don’t get enough follow-up and face cancer returning unexpectedly.
“We need better ways to know who’s at risk so we can treat people more accurately,” says Professor Samuel. “It’s not good enough to rely on guesswork.”
To solve this, his team is focusing on 10 key biomarkers—substances in the body that tumors may release into the bloodstream.
These biomarkers could act like warning signs, helping doctors identify who is more likely to develop early-onset bowel cancer and who might experience a relapse after treatment. With this information, doctors could tailor treatment plans to each patient, reduce unnecessary therapies, and improve long-term outcomes.
Over the past year, the team has worked to lay the foundation for this biomarker research. Their goal is to:
- Identify people at higher risk of early-onset bowel cancer
- Predict which patients are more likely to relapse after surgery
- Create more personalized and accurate treatment plans
- Reduce unnecessary treatment and the side effects that come with it
Julien Wiggins, CEO of Bowel Cancer Australia, says this research is vital. “The risk of being diagnosed before age 40 has more than doubled since 2000,” he notes. “Now, 1 in 9 new cases of bowel cancer are in people under 50. We need to understand why this is happening.”
The project brings together top researchers and clinicians from the University of South Australia, SA Pathology’s Centre for Cancer Biology, the Central Adelaide Local Health Network, and the Basil Hetzel Institute. Together, they hope their work will lead to earlier detection, smarter treatments, and better outcomes for patients of all ages.
With this research now underway, there is growing hope that science will not only solve the mystery of why younger people are increasingly being diagnosed—but also offer them a clearer path to recovery.
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The research findings can be found in medRxiv.
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