Simpler test overlooks many potential colon cancers in women

Wednesday, May 18th 2005, 12:22 pm

By: News On 6

BOSTON (AP) _ A common screening tool for colon cancer, sigmoidoscopy, misses precancerous tumors in almost two-thirds of women _ a disturbing failure rate twice as high as in men, a government-backed study found.

``All our data until now has been based on men. What this this data shows is it's a lot worse in women,'' said Dr. Philip Schoenfeld of the University of Michigan and U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

The researchers said colonoscopy _ a more reliable but more expensive test than sigmoidoscopy _ should now be considered the preferred method for most women.

Schoenfeld led the study of 1,463 women, ages 50 to 79, at four military hospitals. It was published Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine and funded by the National Cancer Institute.

Colonoscopy employs a longer tube to inspect more of the long, twisting colon for precancerous polyps, but sigmoidoscopy does not require the use of a sedative.

The researchers first used colonoscopes to find all polyps. They then calculated how many worrisome ones would have been missed by sigmoidoscopy alone.

Sigmoidoscopes were already in question because they find precancerous tumors in only 66 percent of average-risk men who have them. In the latest study, sigmoidoscopes did even worse in average-risk women, detecting precancerous tumors in just 35 percent of the patients who had them.

About 56,000 Americans are expected to die of colorectal cancer this year.