Taipei Times
Date: Jun 27, 2015
By: Stacy Hsu  /  Staff reporter

The Health Promotion Administration (HPA) yesterday urged people to regularly undergo fecal immunochemical testing (FIT) even if they have no suspicious symptoms, after research found that the test can effectively reduce the mortality rate for colon cancer, the nation’s No. 1 killer.

The administration and the National Taiwan University’s College of Public Health jointly monitored — over an average period of 3.1 years — the health of 1.16 million Taiwanese who underwent an FIT test between 2004 and 2009.

The research cross-analyzed the information gleaned in the project with the nation’s cancer registry records and cause-of-death data to ascertain the respective risks for colon cancer among those who had received the screening test and those who had not.

“The research participants accounted for 21.4 percent of all the 5.42 million eligible test recipients aged from 50 to 69 during the period. Among them, 30 percent underwent FIT regularly,” HPA Cancer Prevention Section Director Wu Chien-yuan (吳建遠) said.     [FULL  STORY]