Many deaths from bowel cancer in the Republic could be avoided if a colon cancer screening programme was to be initiated here, a leading gastroenterologist has said.
Prof Colm Ó Mórain, Professor of Medicine at Trinity College Dublin and consultant gastroenterologist at Tallaght Hospital in west Dublin, said yesterday that colon cancer killed 1,800 people in the Republic every year.
"This is a great tragedy when virtually all of these deaths could be avoided with early detection," he told a conference to mark the 250th anniversary of the Meath Hospital.
Prof Ó Mórain said the department of gastroenterology at Tallaght Hospital had recently put a proposal to the Department of Health to fund a pilot colon cancer screening programme in south-west Dublin.
"This pilot scheme has the potential to establish a means of early detection nationally and teach us more about effective intervention," he said.
The pilot initiative proposes to screen everyone between the ages of 50 and 80 using a test for the presence of blood in a stool sample.
According to Prof Ó Mórain, international experience shows a pick-up rate of 60 per cent should be possible; of 10 people with early cancer of the bowel, six will be detected using a three-stage screening programme.
Asked about the cost of the project, Prof Ó Mórain told The Irish Times that a budget of €1.7 million would cover screening costs as well as the cost of treating those additional patients found to have cancer as a result of the screening programme.
"A public awareness campaign is an essential part of the initiative.
"When this has been carried out elsewhere a 60 per cent acceptability and participation rate has resulted," he said.
He estimates that the pilot programme would screen 120,000 people in the south-west of Dublin over a two-year period.
Prof Jean Faivre, a speaker from the Faculty of Medicine at Dijon University told the conference of the French experience with screening for colon cancer.
Twenty-five per cent of the population are participating in a national screening programme using a method which detects the presence of blood in faecal samples.
"There are three European population-based trials . . . that have reported a 14 to 18 per cent reduction in colorectal cancer mortality with a average follow-up of 10 years," he said.
Earlier this week the latest report from the National Cancer Registry found that men were almost twice as likely as women to die of bowel cancer.
New cases are increasing at a rate of 1.5 per cent a year in men, but by only 0.6 per cent in women. The Republic has one of the highest rates of bowel cancer in the EU.