What is a polyp anyway?
In response to yesterday’s posting of an advanced circumferential colon cancer, a reader asked me to post a picture of what the normal colon looks like:
- Example of normal colon (as seen during colonoscopy)
The thing is that you don’t go to bed one night with an entirely normal colon and wake up the next day with colon cancer!
The current thinking and current evidence suggests that pretty much all colon cancer comes from “pre-cancerous polyps” that have grown over time and transformed into colon cancer.
How a polyp becomes a cancer...
A polyp is any “mucosal protuberance.”
Mucosa is that slippery tissue that makes up certain parts of our bodies. One readily apparent example of mucosa is the inside lining of your mouth/cheek. That slippery, wet, pinkish tissue inside your mouth that gets burned when you eat cheese pizza that is too hot is known as “buccal mucosa.”
When growths develop on the inside of the colon wall, they are called colon polyps.
- A small polyp
- A medium-sized polyp
- A large polyp
I often describe polyps to my patients as “mushrooms growing on the colon wall.” Sometimes they are like the mushroom cap, in which case we call them “sessile.” The first two (small and medium) are examples of sessile polyps.
Other times, they have a stem to them (like the large polyp above and one below), in which case we call it “pedunculated”:
- Notice the lollipop stem!
March 4th, 2009 at 8:42 pm
How long does it take for a polyp to make the change into cancer?