The U.S. health care system has the capacity to screen as many as 80% of eligible adults for colorectal cancer, which would meet national goals for 2018. Unfortunately, not enough people are getting screened: Only half of adults in the U.S. are up-to-date on screening, according to the CDC.
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To find out whether the screening capacity would be up to the task, CDC researchers estimated the number of colonoscopies or fecal immunochemical tests (FITs) that would be necessary every year to screen 80% of adults aged between 50 and 75 years. To accomplish this goal by 2024, the researchers say a national screening program that began in 2014 would need about 47 million FIT procedures and 5.1 million colonoscopies annually, using FIT as the primary screening test. About 11 to 13 million colonoscopies would be needed if a colonoscopy-only screening program were used.
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The researchers also used data from the 2012 Survey of Endoscopic Capacity, which estimated that about 15 million colonoscopies were performed in 2012 and 10.5 million more could be performed every year.
“Colorectal cancer is the second leading cancer killer for men and women in the U.S.,” said Djenaba Joseph, MD, MPH, medical director of CDC’s colorectal cancer control program and lead author of the study paper, “but it doesn’t have to be.”
