Colonoscopies come with potential for complications.
There are actually a number of companies which have either released or plan to release non-invasive colorectal cancer screening based on blood dna sequencing.
GRAIL, Freenome, and Guardant all have tests out or coming down the pipeline.
I got a letter from the government last year saying they wanted some of my poo, so I sent them some. The whole thing was weird, but much better than visiting a doctor.
Colonoscopies also have a big advantage in that while the doctors are in there, if they see anything forming that is pre-cancerous they can take it out before it turns into a problem that would show up on a blood test.
* props to @nwellinghof whose response I stole and adapted
Which is why after another screening method sees something you are offered a colonoscopy to look further and if early enough do a simple removal which is much less of a risk and has less side effects than a full operation to remove parts of the bowel.
Sure but procedural complications are actually quite rare, as alluded to in this article.
Misses from operator error, suboptimal bowel prep, or inability to complete the examination are more common and where we have the most potential for benefit from novel screening tests.
> Sure but procedural complications are actually quite rare, as alluded to in this article.
article actually says that perforation (requires emergency surgery as per article) is between 1 to 100 and 1 to 20000 base on some studies, which sounds very high if it is not mistake.
90/100k cancer rate is likely annual rate, while complication rate is likely per procedure, so you would need to multiply cancer rate by 3 (avg years between procedures) to have reasonable comparison.
(Just to be clear: this is the wrong model. An annual rate of cancer (X%) at a population aggregate does not mean that you have X% independent probability of getting cancer per year. But even assuming that was true, you couldn't just multiply by 3.)
There are actually a number of companies which have either released or plan to release non-invasive colorectal cancer screening based on blood dna sequencing.
GRAIL, Freenome, and Guardant all have tests out or coming down the pipeline.