A new study, led by experts at the University of Nottingham, has found that people who test positive following a stool test for symptoms of bowel cancer, had double the risk of death after one year than people who had negative tests, and most of the deaths were due to other causes.
The data from the study, which is led by Professor David Humes in the School of Medicine and supported by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), will now be used to look at whether this certain test could be used to test for other types of diseases, as well as bowel cancer.
Bowel cancer is the third most common cancer and second highest cause of cancer death in the UK. This new study, published in the journal Lancet Primary Care, looked at FITs (faecal immunochemical tests). FITs are used by GPs to detect microscopic traces of blood in people's poo who have symptoms of bowel cancer (colorectal cancer).
If the test is 'negative', then the risk of bowel cancer is very low and no further tests are needed.
"There has been a huge increase in the number of FITs being done each year but there are many other reasons why someone might have a 'positive' result," says Dr Francesca Malcolm, a Clinical Research Fellow in Colorectal Surgery and NIHR Doctoral Fellow in the School of Medicine at the University and lead author of the study.
Research from bowel cancer screening has linked a 'positive' FIT with an increased risk of dying from diseases other than bowel cancer. No studies have looked at whether this is the case in patients having FIT for symptoms of bowel cancer.
"We have done the first study looking into the risk of death in patients who have had a 'positive' FIT with symptoms of bowel cancer," adds Dr Malcolm.
The team used anonymous data which was collected from nearly 50,000 patients living in Nottingham between 2017 and 2022 who had a FIT due to symptoms of bowel cancer.
In the year following a FIT due to bowel cancer symptoms, 1,971 (4%) patients died.
In our study, after one-year patients with a 'positive' FIT had double the risk of death compared to patients with a 'negative' test. Whilst this is a test for bowel cancer most of deaths were due to other causes. We hope to use these results to improve how FIT is used in future. The next step is to look at causes of death after a 'positive' FIT as this will help decide whether other diseases should be tested for after a 'positive' result."
The full study can be found here.
