RECEDE study
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Reducing Colonoscopies in patients without significant bowel disease
IRAS ID
282247
Contact name
Ramesh Arasaradnam
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University Hospital Coventry & Wawrickshire
Duration of Study in the UK
2 years, 7 months, 1 days
Research summary
Investigating people with bowel symptoms uses a test that detects traces of blood in the stools, the FIT test. There are many possible reasons for positive tests. A few people have cancer. But most patients with symptoms don’t have any serious bowel disease, rather they have benign problems such as piles or irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). It is very difficult to diagnose on FIT alone, those patients who have serious bowel disease and those who do not.
After a test, people are invited for colonoscopy – a sort of camera examination of the large bowel. Most people invited for colonoscopy don’t have cancer. Only about 5% of those with positive FIT tests have cancer. About 25% have other significant bowel diseases, but most have nothing seriously wrong at all. So, they have the inconvenience and discomfort of colonoscopy but don’t get any benefit from it. Plus the NHS incurs costs and resources which could be avoided.
We want to try adding another test, the VOC test (from a urine sample), to see if we can separate those with positive FIT tests who do have something wrong, from those who don’t. Using both tests might be better for detecting cancer as FIT alone misses about 20% of cancers.
So, we think that using both tests might not only be better for detecting cancer, but also might mean that a lot of people will avoid having to have colonoscopy.
We will recruit 1,819 patients with bowel symptoms from multiple hospitals in different parts of the UK. They will provide stool samples for FIT and urine samples for VOC analysis. They will all have a colonoscopy to get a definite diagnosis. Then we will look at their FIT and VOC results to see if an SBD diagnosis can be made from these tests alone.REC name
North West - Liverpool Central Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
20/NW/0346
Date of REC Opinion
22 Aug 2020
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion