Bowel screening may reveal other diseases

Tuesday July 17th, 2018

The UK screening programme for bowel cancer may be identifying people at risk from a range of other diseases, researchers say today.

An observational analysis has found that patients with digestive tract bleeding identified through screening face a 58% increased risk of premature mortality – even if they do not have bowel cancer.

Writing in Gut, researchers say that patients who are found to be clear of cancer should be alert to their extra risks.

They suggest that the test is identifying problems of generalised inflammation that might be associated with other diseases, including other solid cancers and Alzheimer’s disease.

Researchers, led by Professor Robert Steele, of Ninewells Hospital and Medical School, Dundee, Scotland, studied outcomes for nearly 134,000 people in Tayside screened since 2000. Some 2,714 had positive test results.

The study found that the increased mortality came from circulatory, respiratory, digestive tract, neuropsychological, blood and hormone diseases.

Writing in the journal, Professor Uri Ladabaum, of Stanford University School of Medicine, says the screening results “may be telling us more than we might have thought. If the eye is the window to the soul, is a faecal test the window to general health?”

He adds: “Perhaps more importantly, if occult blood in faeces is a predictor of life expectancy and multiple causes of death, the inevitable next questions concern the implications for organised screening programmes or opportunistic screening.”

Occult blood in faeces is associated with all cause and non-colorectal cancer mortality Gut 17 July 2018; doi 10.1136/gutjnl-2018-316483

http://gut.bmj.com/lookup/doi/10.1136/gut-jnl-2018-316483

Tags: Gastroenterology | General Health | NHS | UK News

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