ENDOSCOPIC FINDINGS IN AN INICIAL ROUND OF COLORECTAL CANCER SCREENING IN A POPULATION FROM 60 TO 70 YEARS OLD

Aims:

The incidence of colorectal cancer (CRC) increases significantly in people over 50 years. The colorectal cancer population screening programmes are starting to take place in different Spanish autonomic communities. We aimed to describe the endoscopic findings of the elderly patients included in the CRC screening programme.

Methods:

Patients between 60 and 70 years old that underwent a colonoscopy in the first round of CRC population screening program were included (2014 between 65 – 70 years old and 2015 between 60 – 65). The invitation to participate was made by a postal mail that encouraged to the realization of an immunological faecal occult blood test (FOBT), using a positivity threshold of 100 ng/ml. As a control group we used data from the endoscopy database filtering patients that had a colonoscopy between March 2012 and July 2013 (when there was no CRC population screening program). We analysed the endoscopic findings as well as their relation to the FOBT value.

Results:

Colonoscopy was performed on 1206 patients for FOBT+ in the analysed period and we compared the results with 330 explorations in the control group. There was a high prevalence of polyps and high risk adenomas in the CRC screening population programme compared to the control group (19.2 vs. 11.5%; p < 0.001; 44.8 vs. 12.9%, p < 0.001). Furthermore there was a higher rate of CRC, even though it achieved no statistically significance. The differences between both groups were statistically significant favouring the group of 60 – 65 years in the polyp detection rate (72.7 vs. 66.2%; p = 0.016) as well as in high risk adenoma detection (52 vs. 44.8%; p = 0.013), but not for CRC (6 – 4 vs. 9.3%; p = 0.067).

Conclusions:

The CRC screening programme in our region has obtained excellent results compared to the literature, with a high polyp detection rate as well as high risk adenoma detection.