Because colon cancer is a disease difficult to cure, early diagnosis, like in every type of cancer case, is very important. So, the question here is how can colon cancer be diagnosed?

Colon cancer diagnosis must be done after the cancer has stated to develop, but it is not actually formed as a cancer, but the polyps have the potential of becoming cancerous. This is colon cancer stage zero, in which the disease can be treated very easy. Anyway, this is the most desired situation, but in most cases colon cancer diagnosis comes after a long period of time, measured in months of trying to establish the cause of some symptoms. And when colon cancer symptoms occur, many patients believe that they are having hemorrhoids.

Some patients get the colon cancer diagnosis with great surprise and the disease development can come as a shock for them after a routine colonoscopy check. The diagnosis can be done through some certain medical tests and a laboratory analysis can confirm the presence of cancer. The shock that some people have when they are told that colon cancer was developed in their cases, is due the lack of symptoms that this disease show in the earliest stages. Sometimes symptoms can not be present at all. Some of the signs that a patient may experience when cancer grows are the unexplained loss of weight and the blood presence in the individual’s stools.

The tests that are used for colon cancer diagnosis can regard stool testing, barium enema, virtual colonoscopy, sigmoidoscopy, and colonoscopy. Every test can be used in different situations, so your doctor will be the one that will recommend you which one is the best to use in your case. However, colonoscopy seems to be the most used one because with this test the doctor can see inside the individual’s body and look using a tiny camera for abnormal growths in the colon area. In this intervention, a biopsy sample can be taken form that part of the colon the doctor thinks may be affected by cancer. Through a biopsy, tissues, cells or fluids from the body can be taken for examination. The with microscopes use, the doctors can establish if the sample is a cancerous one or not. The colon cancer diagnosis is putted by the doctor and considered final only when the biopsy confirms it and after it has been analyzed in a laboratory. Not in all the samples cancer cells will be contained, so if you have gone through this intervention and a sample was sent to analyze, do not think that the result will surly come wrong. After a confirmation has been made by the laboratory, the next step is to establish the exact stage of the colon cancer that was been formed.