AlQa'dah 22, 1434, Sep 28, 2013, SPA -- European governments should divert funds to routine bowel cancer tests from less effective breast and prostate screening programmes, scientists said on Saturday, presenting what they called "irrefutable" evidence that bowel screening saves lives, Reuters reported. Many governments devote significant funds to breast cancer screening, but studies in recent years have found that routine breast mammograms can also lead to so-called "over-diagnosis" when tests pick up tumours that would not have caused a problem. And a new study presented at the European Cancer Conference (ECC) in Amsterdam at the weekend showed men experience more harm than good from routine prostate cancer screening tests. In bowel cancer screening, however, the risk of over-diagnosis is very low, while gains in terms of reducing deaths are large - making routine testing cost-effective, Philippe Autier, a professor at France's International Prevention Research Institute (IPPR), told the conference. "There is now an irrefutable case for devoting some of the resources from breast and prostate cancer screening to the early detection of colorectal (bowel) cancer," he said. A large European study published last year found that breast screening programmes over-diagnose about four cases for every 1,000 women aged between 50 and 69 who are screened. The IPPR's research director Mathieu Boniol, who studied the impact of prostate screening, said his results showed routine use of prostate-specific antigen (PSA) tests creates more harm in terms of incontinence, impotence and other side-effects from prostate cancer treatments than benefit in terms of detecting life-threatening cancers. "PSA testing should be reduced and more attention should be given to the harmful effects of screening," he told delegates. Meanwhile, results of a study conducted by Autier using data from 11 European countries between 1989 and 2010 showed that the greater the proportions of men and women routinely screened for bowel cancer, the greater the reductions in death rates. Colorectal cancer kills more than 600,000 people a year worldwide, according to the World Health Organization. In Europe some 400,000 people are diagnosed with the disease each year. In Austria, for example, where 61 percent of those studied reported having had colorectal screening tests, deaths from this form of cancer dropped by 39 percent for men and 47 percent for women over the decade. Meanwhile in Greece, where only 8 percent of males had had bowel cancer screening, death rates rose by 30 percent for men. -- SPA 18:38 LOCAL TIME 15:38 GMT تغريد
