Abstract
We investigated the outcomes of endoscopic screening for stomach cancer in individual medical examinations in Maebashi City between FY2006 and FY2010. The number of examinees increased every year and a marked increase was noted particularly among those aged 60 years and older. The mean stomach cancer detection rate was 0.53%, whereas the detection rate by fiscal year showed a decreasing trend from FY2007 onward, mainly due to a decrease in the number of new examinees. The number of facilities with transnasal endoscopes increased from 13 to 48, and the number of examinees undergoing transnasal endoscopic screening also increased from 1,667 to 9,651. We classified medical examiners into specialists and non-specialists based on their experiences with an endoscope, and compared the two groups in terms of the stomach cancer detection rate, early cancer detection rate, biopsy rate, positive predictive value, and false negative rate. However, no significant differences were found between them. There were large inter-facility differences in the biopsy rate and positive predictive value, irrespective of whether the screening was performed by a specialist or a non-specialist. Future challenges include the acquisition of new examinees that have not undergone stomach cancer screening, and the reduction of inter-facility differences in the diagnostic performance of endoscopy.
