EDITOR’S NOTE: The podcast Chasing Life With Dr. Sanjay Gupta explores the medical science behind some of life’s mysteries big and small. You can listen to episodes here.

(CNN) — Nobody ever wants to hear they have cancer, but when it strikes a young person, the news is perhaps even more devastating because everything about the future they were imagining and working toward is thrown into question.

Unfortunately, early-onset cancer — disease in people younger than 50 years old — is being diagnosed more frequently, according to various studies. And among early-onset cancers, colorectal cancer hovers near the top of the list.

“It was shocking to see that a young person — perfectly fit and healthy, no risk factors, no family history — could be diagnosed with Stage 4 disease. And then it just became more and more common, which is also distressing,” Dr. Kimmie Ng told CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta recently on his podcast, Chasing Life.

Ng, a gastrointestinal oncologist and associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, has been treating patients for two decades at Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, where she is the founding director of the Young-Onset Colorectal Cancer Center, one of the nation’s first centers that treat younger adults with the disease.

The incidence of both colon and rectal cancer has been increasing by about 2% per year in younger people since the mid-1990s, Ng said, noting that it’s happ