Is a turf war brewing? It seems so. Radiologists want to get a piece of the colonoscopy pie by slanting recent study, making virtual colonoscopy look good:
The paper, published Monday in the journal Cancer, used data from earlier studies to compare costs and benefits of CT scans with two more common screening techniques “” optical colonoscopy and flexible sigmoidoscopy. CT scans came out on top. The first author, Perry Pickhardt, is a radiologist and a leading expert in virtual colonoscopy.
Polyps are small growths that can become cancerous. Pickhardt’s analysis makes a key assumption “” that patients with small polyps (less than 6 millimeters across) won’t be referred for follow-up colonoscopies. He cites “consensus guidelines” as the basis for that assumption. But while it’s true that small polyps don’t pose an immediate cancer threat, the “consensus” doesn’t necessarily reflect the view of gastroenterologists.
The problem with virtual colonoscopy is that whenever there is a suspicious lesion, a traditional colonoscopy would be needed anyways to perform the biopsy.
