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A 40-year-old woman elected to have a colonoscopy years before the standard age—and was shocked to learn her instincts to do so were completely right.
Janae Pettit, 40, is from Utah, and has encouraged other young people not to simply wait for the recommended age to get a procedure done if there is a family history of a disease that can be prevented by screening.
She told Newsweek: “I tried to have no expectations when I got the procedure done, but I was obviously hoping for the best.”
The general age for undergoing a colonoscopy is 45, but as Pettit has a family history of colon cancer, with her uncle dying of the devastating disease in his early 50s, and her brother finding tumors in his colon at his first colonoscopy aged 41—she was determined to get checked out early.
A colonoscopy is an examination of the inside of the large intestine and can identify gastrointestinal diseases and even help to prevent colon cancer by catching masses that could turn cancerous in the future. Middle-aged and older adults are recommended to undergo routine colonoscopies to screen for cancer, according to the Cleveland Clinic.
Pettit said in a post to Threads that she “couldn’t shake the impression I had that I needed to get one now that I’m officially middle-aged,” and despite the “miserable” preparation that saw her have to fast and clear out her intestines, it went off without a hitch.
Happy she got the procedure done, but not really expecting there to be anything wrong, Pettit as stunned when she got the results—two different polyps had been removed. One of which was a tubular Adenoma, which can lead to colon cancer.
A tubular adenoma is a precancerous polyp that acts as the body’s “early warning system” for colon cancer, according to the Cleveland Clinic. Just under one in 10 of tubular adenomas become cancerous in the future, and one developing in the colon may suggest that a person has a higher risk of developing colorectal cancer in the future.
“When the doctor told me afterward that I had two polyps in two different parts of my colon, I was just relieved there weren’t more,” Pettit told Newsweek. “And I thought, ‘It’s only two, how bad could they have been?’
“Then the pathology results came back and showed that one of them was the type that turns into cancer. That’s when I had a moment of shock and relief.”
She says that she now wonders about what would have happened “if I had waited five more years for the standard age of 45 to get a colonoscopy. That tubular adenoma would have had five more years to fester, and who knows how long it was there to begin with.”
“Knowing my family’s medical history with colon cancer, I feel pretty certain it would have turned into something much worse, and I would have had to do much more than that single procedure to remove a much bigger problem,” she said.
In her Threads post, to her account @janae.nae.nae, she urged others: “The miserable three days prepping for a colonoscopy are so much easier to manage than months or years of treating cancer later.
“Don’t delay it because you’re scared. I just shared my experience—it was honestly not so bad, and apparently very worth it in my case.”
Colorectal cancer is the third-most common cancer diagnosed in both men and women in the United States, with an estimated 108,000 new cases of colon cancer and 50,000 new cases of rectal cancer expected to be diagnosed in 2026 alone.
However, the American Cancer Society reports that the rate of people being diagnosed with these cancers has dropped overall, due to people getting screened using colonoscopies and changing lifestyle-related risk factors.
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Sirena Bergman and Emma Lee-Sang
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