A new online tool for calculating colorectal cancer risk in men and women age 50 or older was launched today, based on a new risk-assessment model developed by researchers at the National Cancer Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health. This new tool may assist health care providers and their patients in making informed choices about when and how to screen for colorectal cancer and can be used in designing colorectal cancer screening and prevention trials. An article describing the new risk-assessment model and a second article describing its validation appear online December 29, 2008, in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. The risk assessment tool is available on the NCI Web site at www.cancer.gov/colorectalcancerrisk, and people using this tool should work with their health care providers to interpret the results.

Using easily obtainable information (e.g. personal and family medical history, lifestyle behaviors, and age), the tool provides an estimate of an individual’s risk of developing colorectal cancer over certain time periods (within five years, 10 years and over the course of a lifetime). This risk-assessment model is the first to provide an absolute risk estimate for colorectal cancer (i.e. the probability of developing colorectal cancer over a given period of time) for the general, non-Hispanic white population age 50 or older in the United States.