England's NHS upgrading bowel cancer screening accuracy: Details inside

Under the National screening programme, health officials from the NHS have announced that the main test for the UK’s second deadliest cancer is being made more accurate in England.

The NHS officials estimate that about 2,000 people a year will be able to undergo preventive surgery earlier, before the disease develops.

Bowel cancer is one of the most common cancers in the UK, with more than 44,000 diagnoses every year.

The sensitivity of the faecal immunochemical test (Fit), which diagnoses bowel cancer by identifying blood in the patient’s stool, will be increased as part of an overhaul of cancer diagnoses and treatment.

It is now 120 micrograms of blood per gram of stool. But that will be reduced to 80 micrograms by 2028 and will bring England into line with the threshold already used in Scotland and Wales, as reported by The Guardian.

Risk factors include eating processed meat, being overweight, and drinking alcohol, according to the findings of a leading Cancer Research UK study that more than half of cases—54%—are curable.

NHS England, in a statement, said that “Once fully implemented, testing at the lower threshold is expected to reduce late-stage diagnoses and deaths from bowel cancer by around 6%.”

According to its estimates, it will save the health service £32m annually.

The change will anchor a rise of 600 more bowel cancer diagnoses a year in England, an 11 % increase on top of the 5,320 cases that are identified annually by the current test, the publication has reported.

The Fit test was introduced at the NHS’s bowel cancer testing program in 2019.

It’s an at-home screening program in which eligible patients are sent a Fit test in the post.

Patients mail it back with a small stool sample for laboratory testing. The plan will be included in the government’s new national cancer blueprint, set to launch on February 4, a day that is commemorated as World Cancer Day.

The age bracket for eligibility in England was expanded in 2024, from 54-74 to include those aged 50-53.

In 2023-24, the NHS mailed the test kit to roughly 7 million people, of whom 68% returned it, leading to the diagnosis of 5,320 cancers.

An extra 1.2 million people are now being mailed the kit due to the expanded age criteria.