Remembering Tina Turner and Intestinal Cancer

What Tina Turner made public

Tina Turner died on May 24, 2023, at her home in Switzerland. She was 83. Her publicist's statement, provided to NBC News, gave the cause as a long illness.

In the years before that, she had spoken openly about a series of health problems. TODAY, reporting after her death, summarized what she had disclosed: intestinal cancer in 2016, a stroke in 2013, and a kidney transplant in 2017. She had lived with high blood pressure for much of her life.

That is the public account, and this article stops there. Her medical decisions were her own, and they are not the subject here. What is useful is the phrase itself, because "intestinal cancer" is one of the vaguest terms in the whole of health reporting.

A region, not a diagnosis

The intestine is not one organ. It is a tube roughly 25 feet long, divided into two very different neighborhoods. Cancer behaves differently in each.

The small intestine runs from the stomach to the colon. It has three parts: the duodenum, the jejunum, and the ileum. Its job is absorbing nutrients.

The large intestine is the colon and the rectum. Its job is reclaiming water and moving waste out. Cancer here is called colorectal cancer.

Those two neighborhoods differ enormously in how often cancer strikes, how it is found, and whether it can be prevented. A headline that says "intestinal cancer" tells you almost nothing about which situation is meant.

The small intestine: rare, and hard to see

Small intestine cancer is uncommon. American Cancer Society projections, reprinted by the National Cancer Institute, give 14,450 new cases and 2,170 deaths in the United States for 2026, about 0.7% of all new cancer diagnoses. It makes up roughly 3.8% of all digestive system cancers. The median age at diagnosis is 66.

It is also not one disease. NCI lists several tumor types that occur there:

• Adenocarcinoma, arising from gland cells in the lining. NCI puts this at roughly 25% to 50% of primary malignant small intestine tumors, most of them in the duodenum.
• Neuroendocrine tumors, about 20% of malignant lesions there, occurring more often in the ileum.
• Lymphoma, of the non-Hodgkin type.
• Sarcoma, most commonly leiomyosarcoma, which occurs most often in the ileum.
• Gastrointestinal stromal tumors, known as GISTs.

NCI lists these risk factors: a high-fat diet, Crohn disease, celiac disease, and familial adenomatous polyposis, an inherited condition that causes many polyps.

There is no screening test for small intestine cancer. Part of the reason is plain geometry. A colonoscope reaches the colon. The small intestine is long, mobile, and mostly out of reach of ordinary scopes, which is why diagnosis often needs capsule endoscopy, a swallowed camera, or double balloon endoscopy, a specialized technique that inches a scope deeper.

The large intestine: common, and often preventable

Colorectal cancer is a different scale of problem. SEER, the federal cancer statistics program, lists 158,850 new cases in the United States for 2026 and 55,230 deaths, and both come from the American Cancer Society.

It is also the rare cancer that screening can prevent rather than merely catch. Most colorectal cancers begin as a polyp, a small growth on the bowel lining. NCI states plainly that finding and removing polyps can prevent colorectal cancer. The polyp comes out during the same colonoscopy that found it, and the cancer never happens.

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, in its recommendation of May 18, 2021, grades screening an A for adults aged 50 to 75 and a B for adults aged 45 to 49. Several options are accepted. They include a yearly fecal immunochemical test, and stool DNA-FIT every one to three years. CT colonography and flexible sigmoidoscopy are done every five years. Colonoscopy is done every ten years.

When to get checked

Symptoms overlap between the two regions, which is exactly why they should be taken to a clinician rather than sorted at home.

For the small intestine, NCI says to check with a doctor about:

• Pain or cramping in the middle of the abdomen.
• Weight loss with no known reason.
• A lump in the abdomen.
• Blood in the stool.

For the colon and rectum, NCI lists:

• Blood in the stool, bright red or very dark.
• A change in bowel habits, including diarrhea, constipation, or stools that become narrow.
• Abdominal discomfort that does not settle.
• Unexplained weight loss, fatigue, or vomiting.

Practical thresholds help. A change in bowel habits that has persisted more than a few weeks deserves an appointment. So does any visible rectal bleeding, at any age, even if you have hemorrhoids, because you can have both. So does abdominal pain that keeps waking you or keeps returning to the same spot.

How each one is found

Colorectal cancer is diagnosed mainly by colonoscopy with biopsy, supported by CT, MRI, and PET for staging, plus a blood test for carcinoembryonic antigen.

Small intestine cancer takes more work. NCI lists blood chemistry and liver function tests, upper endoscopy, capsule endoscopy, double balloon endoscopy, an upper GI series with small bowel follow-through, CT, MRI, and sometimes laparotomy, meaning open surgical examination of the abdomen. A biopsy still settles it.

What treatment involves

For small intestine cancer, NCI describes surgery as the approach for disease that can be removed, with clinical trials emphasized for tumors that cannot be removed or that have spread.

For colon cancer, NCI states that surgery is the primary treatment and results in cure in approximately 50% of patients. The involved bowel segment comes out with its lymph nodes. NCI advises examining at least 12 lymph nodes before calling a colon cancer node-negative. Chemotherapy after surgery is standard when nodes contain cancer.

What the numbers can and cannot say

Among people diagnosed from 2016 through 2022, SEER records five-year relative survival for colorectal cancer of 91.3% when it is localized, 75.2% when it has reached regional lymph nodes, and 16.9% once it has spread to distant organs. About 34% are found localized.

Those figures describe large groups of people diagnosed years ago. They do not describe any individual, and they were never designed to. They exist to show what earlier detection is worth across a population.

The lesson from a vague phrase in a headline is a specific one. If you are told you have intestinal cancer, the useful next question is which part, which cell type, and what stage. Those three answers, not the phrase, are what shape everything that follows.

Sources

• NCI: Small Intestine Cancer Treatment (PDQ) — Health Professional Version
• NCI: Small Intestine Cancer Treatment (PDQ) — Patient Version
• NCI: Colon Cancer Treatment (PDQ) — Health Professional Version
• NCI: Colon Cancer Treatment (PDQ) — Patient Version
• SEER Cancer Stat Facts: Small Intestine Cancer
• SEER Cancer Stat Facts: Colorectal Cancer
• American Cancer Society: Cancer Facts & Statistics
• USPSTF: Colorectal Cancer Screening, final recommendation, May 18, 2021
• TODAY: Tina Turner dies at 83 after 'long illness' — what she said about cancer and health struggles