Are you missing cues… if you can’t see all the… hues???
This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science.
Bladder cancer is often spotted when urine changes color. But what if you can’t see red? Ruh roh!
Enter Mustafa Fattah [MOOS-tah-fah FAH-tah] and team at Harvard. They studied nearly three hundred patient records to see if color blindness impaired bladder cancer detection.
Their team compared lifespans between patients with and without color blindness.
Turns out, colorblind patients with bladder cancer had lower survival rates! Decreasing by about fifty percent! Talk about a big RED flag!….. or maybe a not-so-red flag, depending on your vision. Is that… brown?
So maybe get your eyes checked! Because some warning signs can’t be … well… RED!
Reference: Fattah, M., Alsoudi, A.F., Mruthyunjaya, P. et al. Impact of colour vision deficiency on bladder and colorectal cancer survival. Nat. Health 1, 113–119 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44360-025-00032-7