Mount Sinai South Nassau Holds Colorectal Cancer Awareness Event, Urges Public To Get Screened

OCEANSIDE, NY. — Mount Sinai South Nassau hospital celebrated National Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month Wednesday, holding a panel discussion featuring testimony form several Mount Sinai South Nassau staff members and Althea Harry, a 73-year-old Freeport resident who was diagnosed with stage-two colon cancer before being successfully treated at Mount Sinai South Nassau.

According to American Cancer Society data, colorectal cancer has been decreasing in frequency over the past 40 years, mainly thanks to advances in testing, screening and education about lifestyle changes that can help prevent the disease. That downward trend, however, is made up mostly of older adults.

For adults under 50, the trend is actually reversing: ACS data says that rates of colon cancer in under-50 adults have ticked up by almost 3 percent per year between 2013 and 2022. The cancer society’s recommended starting age for regular colorectal cancer screening is 45. Those screenings, Mount Sinai South Nassau said, can reduce the likelihood of colorectal cancer becoming fatal by allowing medical staff to catch the cancer early and remove any malignant presences in the colon.

For Harry, medical treatment took place quickly, as the septuagenarian went to the doctor as soon as she started feeling something wrong. Luckily, the 73-year-old said, the disease proved treatable in her case.

“Colon cancer is curable once you address it immediately,” Harry said. [Mount Sinai South Nassau] took away my fear and gave me calm serenity," Harry said Wednesday. "They teach me to be positive.”

Officials from Mount Sinai South Nassau said Wednesday that the disease was highly treatable and curable, but that far too many people suffer from the disease for lack of proper screening and education surrounding it.

“This is an opportunity for doctors, patients, community, to highlight that this is a highly preventable, treatable disease, but it still affects far too many people. So, awareness, education and timely screening are extremely important,” Dr. Rajiv Datta, Chair of the Department of Surgery, Medical Director of Mount Sinai South Nassau’s Gertrude & Louis Feil Cancer Center said.

For Frank Caliendo, a colorectal and robotic surgeon at Mount Sinai South Nassau, seeing Harry healthy was a source of pride and joy.

“It’s very difficult when such a nice woman comes into your office and has a diagnosis of colorectal cancer,” Caliendo said Wednesday. “With the good fortune of her immune system, the treatment here at Mount Sinai South Nassau, with the medical oncology combined with the radiation, she got an excellent, excellent response. It brings me great joy, as it does the rest of the doctors involved, when we have such a great outcome.”

For his colleagues, the goal of Wednesday’s event proved simple: Get screened.

“The message today is: please get screened, so we don’t have to deal with any of this,” Mount Sinai South Nassau Chief of Colon and Rectal Surgery Dean Pappas said.