Objective: Screening and surveillance for colon lesions is very important, particularly given the increased incidence of be-nign and malign colon diseases with age. The aim of this study was to determine the frequency and characteristics of colon lesions in an elderly population in Turkey.
Materials and Methods: This retrospective study was conducted in the gastroenterology clinic of the Erciyes University Faculty of Medicine Hospital. The histopathological results and demographic characteristics of 1004 elderly patients who underwent a colonoscopy with a biopsy between 2015 and 2019 were retrospectively analyzed.
Results: A total of 1004 elderly patients were included in the study. The findings revealed that 592 (58.9%) of the patients had polyps, 121 (12.05%) had colitis, 23 (2.3%) had ileitis, 88 (8.7%) had colon carcinoma, 2 (0.2%) had amyloidosis, 34 (3.4%) had other histopathological diagnoses (in order of frequency, melanosis coli, lipoma, solitary rectal ulcer, neuroendo-crine tumor, leiomyoma, mantle cell lymphoma, marginal zone lymphoma and 1ow grade dysplasia), and 22 patients had multiple synchronous pathologies.
Conclusion: Colon pathology types and frequencies differ with advanced age. Appropriate colonoscopy screening pro-grams and multiple histopathological sampling methods from each colon segment during colonoscopy offer early recognition of both benign and malignant colon lesions.