Hospitals

Cleveland Clinic researchers crunch cancer study data to build online risk calculators for docs & patients

Predicting who will and who won’t get cancer is far from an exact science, but […]

Predicting who will and who won’t get cancer is far from an exact science, but a new predicted risk calculator developed at Cleveland Clinic leverages years worth of risk factor research to help physicians decide whether colorectal cancer screening might be necessary for different patients.

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommends routine screening for colorectal cancer beginning at age 50, but there are a number of other factors thought to contribute to a person’s risk besides age and family history – race, weight and lifestyle factors like smoking and drinking, for example.

In a paper published today in the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine, a team of Clinic researchers describes a new colorectal cancer risk calculator they created based on data from more than 180,000 people studied as part of the NIH-funded Multiethnic Cohort Study. The study followed an ethnically diverse cohort for more than a decade to examine genetic and lifestyle factors that seemed to be associated with development of cancer.

The calculator is specific to men and women, and generates a 10-year risk percentage based on demographic information, height and weight, smoking and drinking habits and some basic health and medication history questions.

Michael Kattan, chairman of the Department of Quantitative Health Sciences at Cleveland Clinic’s Lerner Research Institute, is leading efforts to create free digital tools to guide physicians and patients in screening decisions around various kinds of diseases. Already they’ve developed more than two dozen other risk prediction tools for heart disease, breast cancer, prostate cancer and other conditions.

The Clinic says they’re also working on software to integrate these tools into electronic health records, to make the risk assessment process easier for physicians.

Creating a risk calculator that includes multiple risk factors offers clinicians a means to more accurately predict risk than the simple age-based cutoffs currently used in clinical practice,” said Dr. Brian Wells, a family medicine physician and the paper’s lead author. “Clinicians could decide to screen high-risk patients earlier than age 50, while delaying or foregoing screening in low-risk individuals.”

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