blood thinners

[olqp]

I am on rivaroxin an have read being on blood thinners can double your risk of bladder cancer.i also read if you do aa bowel cancer screen it can give a false positive any ideas welcome.

[CDreamer]

My thought is what is my risk of stroke - with a Chads score of 4 pretty high risk and the last time I looked that would mean for me a 1/4 chance of having a stroke or TIA this year - unacceptable so I’ll keep popping the A/C’s (Apixaban though not Rivaroxaban).

What is my risk of bladder cancer - I don’t know but I believe very low to insignificant so I am going to say 0. 2 x 0 = 0.

I am going to focus on my actual risks rather than frightening myself by reading headlines of studies which I probably won’t understand the mathematics.

Life comes with risk but I still choose Life. Stay well.

[Sfhmgusa]

Hi , I agree with CDreaamer that it is important to focus on why the anticoagulant in the first place, a stroke can be a life changing or fatal event so risk reduction here is really important.

As to false positives for bowel cancer, this will happen if a non malignancy in your bowel bleeds a bit more than an in medicated person, a colonoscopy is not the end of the world and it will give you the all clear. For me as a 60 year old male I had a negative from the NHS poo test but there was a precancerous polyp there that a colonoscopy found. So I think of the “ hair trigger” of a false positive as a benefit!

Steve

[Hidden]

More likely your thinner would be magnifying invisible bleeding so that’s a good thing. Are you going to stop your thinner because of a false positive bowel test? I read somewhere that there was a lot less “what if?” syndrome before the internet. No offence man...

[Ppiman]

Someone once said, "lies, damned lies and statistics" and they made a good point. I hate the way statistics are used by the press, and I know statisticians who think it is a scandal. The one I hate the most and have since it first appeared decades ago, is that "1 in 3 people will get cancer", accompanied by a picture on a giant poster of three people enjoying a car ride. What a frightening (and misleading) ad campaign that was and it's put me off that charity forever.

"Doubling" a risk isn't very worrying when the risk itself is tiny, so I think we can all rest easy on the bladder cancer risk, myself. The bowel cancer test the government send out isn't really a test for cancer so much as for the presence of blood in the stools which is most often caused by a harmless diverticulum erupting rather than a tumour.

Steve

[Cally53]

I had a positive result from my bowel screening and when I had my colonoscopy they found two polyps which they removed. Thankfully there was no cancer. However, when they rang me with the results, I was told that they had noticed some changes in one of them. It made me realise how important it is for us to do the tests when we receive them. If it wasn't for that false positive test and the quick actions of the NHS to investigate it, I would most likely have developed bowel cancer!

[DK81 in reply to Cally53]

I assume there is no bowel cancer screening during the pandemic, so are you referring to something that happened a while ago?

[Ytarnt in reply to DK81]

Screening is currently being done in the UK.

[Icenae in reply to DK81]

I had a poo test call back last year and a ct scan instead of a colonoscopy as previous one was too painfull. It showed a small polyp which will be watched for now. But all during pandemic.

[Cally53 in reply to DK81]

Mine was just before the pandemic began but my husband has recently been screened.

[MarkS]

I'm not sure where you found that association but it is wrong. The risk of bladder cancer and bowel cancer is actually reduced for those on anticoagulants. See:sciencedirect.com/science/a...

Those on anticoags had between a third and half the risk of bladder cancer. This was because those on anticoags bled earlier so the cancer was picked up earlier.