New Study Finds That Colonoscopies Fail To Reduce Death Rate of Colon Cancers

A recent study found that colonoscopies fail to reduce the death rate among patients suffering from colon cancers despite previous long-held beliefs.

The findings come as for decades, gastroenterologists have put colonoscopies on a pedestal as a life-saving screening procedure. Clinicians believed that if everyone would get the screening just once a decade, colorectal cancer would most likely become "extinct," said a gastroenterologist and researcher in Norway, Michael Bretthauer.

Efficacy of Colonoscopes

However, the findings from a recent clinical trial that Bretthauer led have thrown the confidence in colonoscopy's dominance into doubt. The primary analysis of the trial found that the screening procedure only cut colon cancer risk by roughly one-fifth. This is far below past estimates of the test's efficacy.

Furthermore, the study did not prove any significant reduction in color cancer mortality, with gastroenterologists, such as Bretthauer, racing to the results with a mixture of shock, disappointment, and mild disbelief.

A gastroenterologist at the University of California, San Diego, Samir Gupta, said that the study was a landmark trial. It is the first randomized trial that showed outcomes of exposing people to colonoscopy screening versus no colonoscopy, as per StatNews.

Gupta noted that experts were all anticipating colonoscopy to do better than what the study's results have shown. He said that the findings raise an uncomfortable question for doctors, placing the credibility of colonoscopy in question.

However, he emphasized that the new study does not invalidate colonoscopies as a useful screening tool for colon cancers. The screening test is still a good procedure, but Gupta said it might be time to re-evaluate its standing as the gold standard of colon cancer screening.

According to CNN, the trial found only meager benefits for the group of people who were invited to the screening procedure, which was an 18% lower risk of getting colorectal cancer. It also found no significant reduction in the death rate for the disease.

Benefits of the Screening Procedure

Other experts have chimed in on the study, saying that despite being good, it had its limitations, and noted that the results should not prevent people from getting colonoscopies. Chief scientific officer of the American Cancer Society, Dr. William Dahut, said that it was hard to know the value of a screening test when the majority of people in the screening did not get it done.

When the authors of the study restricted the results to the people who actually got the procedure, which was roughly 12,000 out of the more than 28,000 who were invited to do so, the procedure was found to be more effective. It was observed to reduce the risk of colorectal cancer by 31% and cut the risk of death by roughly 50%.

The researchers performed a pragmatic, randomized trial that involved presumptively healthy men and women aged 55 to 64 drawn from population registries in Poland, Norway, Sweden, and the Netherlands between 2009 and 2014.

The participants in the study were also randomly assigned in a 1:2 ratio to either receive an invitation to undergo a colonoscopy or none at all. The researchers wanted to know the risks of colorectal cancer and related death with a secondary objective of determining the death rate in relation to the procedure, NEJM reported.