 What makes for excellence in heart care? It starts with one of the most amazing teams of heart surgeons and cardiologists that I've seen assembled under one roof and the region's leading technology in a new $40 million dollar facility. This is the nationally recognized Heart and Vascular Institute of Eastern Kentucky at Pikeville Medical Center. March is Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month and Pikeville Medical Center is doing their part to keep everyone informed. Factors such as diet and exercise can reduce one's chance of colon cancer but there are other precautions available. Hematologist slash oncologist Awesoms Jacob gives us more details. So colon cancer is one of the leading cause of cancer deaths in the U.S. Although the number of deaths from colon cancer has reduced over the span of last 20-30 years due to improvement in screening and cancer treatments, however the incidence of colorectal cancer has been going up steadily over these years. And we are also seeing that colon cancer is now more common among younger people than what we were seeing before. And this gives us the this points to the importance of having colorectal cancer screening which is a tool to diagnose a cancer or pre-cancer oscillations early and get it removed before it can go into a cancer oscillation. With colorectal cancer becoming more common, the recommended age to begin screenings has been dropped from 50 to 45 years old. For anyone considering a colonoscopy at PMC, Jacob recommends consulting their primary care physician for a referral. Due to this increased incidence in younger people, the current guidelines are mostly recommending starting colon cancer screening at an early age of 45 years. And with colon cancer screening, colonoscopy is still considered the gold standard and it has to be repeated every 10 years at least under the age of 75. The most important thing is that if you find colon cancer at an early stage, treatments work better in that case and we may be able to completely cure the disease. And that's where screening for colorectal cancer comes into importance.