Closing the gap: How new screening interventions could reduce inequalities in bowel cancer outcomes (5 July 2022)

Summary

Cancer screening involves testing for early signs of cancer in people without symptoms. It can help spot cancers at an early stage, when treatment is more likely to be successful, or in some cases prevent cancer from developing the first place. The screening test for bowel cancer is the faecal immunochemical test, or FIT, that looks for tiny traces of blood in your poo. These tests are sent to everyone in the eligible population every two years. In this blog Jacob Smith from Cancer Research UK looks at the importance of increasing bowel cancer screening in socioeconomically deprived communities, where there is a higher incidence of bowel cancer and death from bowel cancer. This is partly due to lower levels of participation in screening.

The blog highlights the results of a recent study carried out by the University of Sheffield to determine which interventions may be successful in reducing health inequalities related to bowel cancer screening. Modelling found that re-inviting non-participants to take part in screening each year was a highly effective intervention, and it is estimated that this approach would prevent over 11,000 bowel cancer deaths over the lifetime of the current English population aged 50-74.