I’m David Kerr, professor of cancer medicine from University of Oxford in England. I have had a lifelong professional interest in the biology and treatment of colorectal cancer. A nice paper popped up recently in The Lancet Oncology, looking at the impact of colorectal cancer screening.
I’ve said this many times before, but as I’ve become older, more mature (one might argue), and wiser (possibly), I’ve become interested more in the concept of prevention rather than cure, given the relatively sparse armamentarium of drugs that we have to manage colorectal cancer. This excellent paper reports an outstanding European-wide study of 21 countries over 16 years, from 2000 until 2016. Investigators used data that were gathered from national cancer registries, as far as possible, to examine the incidence, mortality, and stage of presentation of colorectal cancer in these countries. And they conducted various computations for each of these.