Failure to undergo a follow-up colonoscopy after testing positive in a colorectal cancer screening can increase the risk of death from colorectal cancer by 64 percent, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday.
The incidence rate of colorectal cancer has been increasing in Taiwan since 2006 and the disease has ranked first among the most common types of cancer for 12 consecutive years, the HPA said, citing the Cancer Registry Annual Report.
About 16,000 people were diagnosed with colorectal cancer in 2017, it said.
Photo: Yang Yuan-ting, Taipei Times
Due to the COVID-19 outbreak, only about 500,000 people underwent a fecal occult blood test under the government-funded national cancer screening program in the first six months of this year, which is about a 20 percent decline from the same period last year, HPA Deputy Director-General Wu Chao-chun (吳昭軍) said.
The number of people who underwent a colonoscopy for diagnosis following a positive fecal occult blood test also fell by about 10 percent, as an estimated 10,000 people who tested positive did not undergo a colonoscopy, HPA data showed.
Colorectal cancer usually does not show symptoms in its early stages, so regularly undergoing colorectal cancer screening is important for detecting early signs, Wu said.
“About one case of colorectal cancer is confirmed in every 20 people who test positive in a fecal occult blood test, which means there might be 500 confirmed cases in 10,000 people,” National Taiwan University Hospital clinical professor of internal medicine Chiu Han-mo (邱瀚模) said.
Among the about 500 possible colorectal cancer cases, about half might have only stage 0 or 1 colorectal cancer, which is highly curable and has a five-year survival rate of up to 95 percent, he said.
However, the survival rate falls if the cancer develops into later stages due to delayed diagnosis and treatment, Chiu said.
The risk of developing colorectal cancer can increase by 2.8 times in people who fail to undergo a colonoscopy within a year of testing positive in a fecal occult blood test, the HPA said.
As 88 percent of colorectal cancer cases have been diagnosed in people aged 50 or above, the HPA provides a free fecal occult blood test every two years to people aged 50 to 74, it said.
Undergoing the test every two years can reduce the colorectal cancer mortality rate by 35 percent, it added.
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