Lord Hunt of Kings Heath – 2015 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Lord Hunt of Kings Heath on 2015-09-17.

To ask Her Majesty’s Government why people who have reached the age of 75 are not automatically invited for a bowel screening to identify symptoms of bowel cancer.

Lord Prior of Brampton

The UK National Screening Committee (UK NSC) advises Ministers and the National Health Service in all four countries about all aspects of screening policy and supports implementation based on the best available evidence.

Bowel cancer screening by Faecal Occult Blood testing for men and women aged 50-74 was recommended by the UK NSC in July 2003. Following this recommendation, the NHS Bowel Cancer Screening Programme in England initially invited men and women aged 60-69 years old as the programme was rolled out across the country. This has now been extended to men and women aged up to 74, as recommended in the Cancer Reform Strategy (2007). The programme offers screening up to the age of 74 based on the original English¹ and Danish² trials along with evidence published in 2010 (Cairns et al, 2010) which recommended that surveillance seizes at the age of 75.

No assessment has been made regarding automatically inviting those over 75 years for bowel screening. Men and women aged above the eligible age limit have been able to self-refer for screening every two years since the programme began, and so far over 150,000 have done so.

¹Hardcastle JD, Chamberlain JO, Robinson MH, Moss SM, Amar SS, Balfour TW, James PD, Mangham CM. Randomised controlled trial of faecal-occult-blood screening for colorectal cancer.

Lancet. 1996:348(9040);1472-7

2 Kronborg O, Fenger C, Olsen J, Jorgensen OD, Sondergaard O. Randomised study of screening for colorectal cancer with faecal-occult-blood test.