First-degree relatives of people with advanced adenomas have an increased risk for colorectal cancer, yet this risk often is unrecognized and appropriate screening often ignored. Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco attempted to change this scenario, and their intervention shows signs of paying off.
“We saw an untapped opportunity to intervene early and intensively at the time of colonoscopy of the index family member. … Our quality improvement interventions led to a 73% improvement in the rate of appropriate guideline-based CRC screening recommendations for high-risk individuals,” said Alec Faggen, MD, a third-year gastroenterology fellow at the UCSF School of Medicine, who presented the findings at the 2022 annual meeting of the American College of Gastroenterology (abstract B0178). The study’s first author was Connie Wang, MD, a transplant hepatology fellow at UCSF.