Mail in screening tests for colorectal cancer seem effective, Elizabeth Tracey reports
Update: 2025-10-13
Description
Most people should start screening for colorectal cancer at age 45, due to increasing rates of the disease in younger people. Now a new study examines the most effective way to get people to be screened. Kimmel Cancer Center director William Nelson at Johns Hopkins describes the study.
Nelson: They took more than 20,000 folks between age of 45 and 49, they randomized them to receive 4 different screening strategies. Three of them involved an active choice to pursue screening, the fecal immunochemical testing, this is a stool test, colonoscopy or both. The other ones they just mailed out materials for the fecal immunochemical testing. When they just mailed it out 26 percent or greater completed screening as opposed to things that ran between about 15 and 17% with all the other modalities. :34
So if you get a test kit in the mail, why not just use it? At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.
Nelson: They took more than 20,000 folks between age of 45 and 49, they randomized them to receive 4 different screening strategies. Three of them involved an active choice to pursue screening, the fecal immunochemical testing, this is a stool test, colonoscopy or both. The other ones they just mailed out materials for the fecal immunochemical testing. When they just mailed it out 26 percent or greater completed screening as opposed to things that ran between about 15 and 17% with all the other modalities. :34
So if you get a test kit in the mail, why not just use it? At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.
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