How to check for colorectal cancer without colonoscopy

Colon cancer is a malignant tumor that seriously endangers the health of patients. Some people with digestive tract discomfort just take medicine perfunctorily when they have clinical symptoms of discomfort, but ignore further examination of the disease. Intestinal cancer has no obvious clinical symptoms in the early stage, so it is very necessary for friends with digestive tract discomfort to do relevant examinations. What are the methods for checking colon cancer without colonoscopy? The following is an introduction to this issue.

1. Laboratory examination: routine blood test, complete biochemistry (liver and kidney function + serum iron), routine stool test + fecal occult blood test, etc., are helpful to understand whether the patient has iron deficiency anemia, liver and kidney function and other basic conditions. Testing for blood tumor marker carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) is helpful for tumor diagnosis. In patients with colorectal cancer, high CEA levels do not mean that there is distant metastasis; in a few patients with metastatic tumors, CEA levels are not elevated.
2. Biopsy and exfoliative cytology: Biopsy is of decisive significance for the diagnosis of colorectal cancer, especially early cancer and polyp cancer, as well as for differential diagnosis of lesions. It can clarify the nature, histological type and malignancy of the tumor, judge the prognosis and guide clinical treatment. Exfoliative cytology has high accuracy, but the sampling is cumbersome, and it is not easy to obtain satisfactory specimens, so it is rarely used in clinical practice.