THURSDAY, Nov. 2 (HealthDay News) -- Male patients undergoing colonoscopy tend to have more advanced colorectal cancer at diagnosis than female patients, according to a report in the Nov. 2 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. The findings suggest that gender should be taken into account along with age and family history when making screening recommendations.
Jaroslaw Regula, M.D., and colleagues from the Maria Sklodowska-Curie Memorial Cancer Center in Warsaw, Poland, performed a cross-sectional analysis of 50,148 participants undergoing colonoscopy screening to determine associations between patient characteristics and advanced neoplasia.
The investigators found that advanced neoplasia was detected in 5.9 percent of participants aged 50 to 66 years and in 3.4 percent of participants aged 40 to 49 years. In addition, advanced neoplasia was more likely to be detected in male subjects (adjusted odds ratio, 1.73) and fewer additional colonoscopies would be required to detect one advanced cancer in men than in women in all age groups.
"We found that sex is an independent predictor of the detection of advanced neoplasia during colonoscopic screening," the authors write. "Different rates of detection of advanced neoplasia during colonoscopic screening of men and women may warrant a refinement of the screening recommendations to include sex along with age and family history of colorectal cancer."
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