Breast exams could be 'teachable moment' to prompt colon cancer screening.

2004 JUN 3 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- Many women who regularly get checked for breast cancer and cervical cancer still don't go for a test that could save them from another big killer: colon cancer, according to new University of Michigan research.

But perhaps their mammogram and Pap smear appointments could be used as "teachable moments" to help prompt them to get their colons checked, the researchers suggest.

In all, women who get the recommended screenings for breast and cervical cancer are still far more likely than other women to have their colons examined through colonoscopy or other methods, the U-M team reports. But a large percentage of even these apparently health-conscious women fail to get screened for colon cancer, the No. 3 cause of cancer death in women after lung cancer and breast cancer.

In a presentation on May 15, 2004, at the annual meeting of the Society for General Internal Medicine, and in a recent talk at the American Roentgen Ray Society annual meeting, the U-M team reported findings from national and Michigan population samples that show a gap between adherence to different types of cancer screening. In those presentations, and in a recent editorial in the American Journal of Managed Care, the researchers suggest that doctors use the occasion of one cancer screening to educate and motivate women to have another.

"Women have internalized the public health message that they should go for regular mammograms, and that they should have Pap smears, because that's what normal women do for themselves," says Ruth C. Carlos, MD, MS, the U-M Health System radiologist who led the research. "Now, they need to add colorectal screenings to the list, and we think that there's tremendous opportunity for physicians and health systems to use women's other screening appointments to increase their awareness."

Carlos is lead author on a presentation at the SGIM meeting, which was given by Steven Bernstein, MD, that shows the gap between breast, cervix, and colon cancer screening using data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's 2001 Behavioral Risk Factors Surveillance Survey. It asked 52,478 women over the age of 50 what cancer checks they'd had, and compared their answers with American Cancer Society guidelines.

In all, only 46% had been checked for colon cancer as recommended, while nearly 70% were up-to-date with cervical cancer screening, and more than 82% had been getting their breasts checked like they should. Even among women who had had both mammograms and Pap smears regularly, only 51% had gotten their colons checked by colonoscopy or another test.