Toufic Kachaamy, Endoscopic Oncology Leader at Mayo Clinic Florida, shared on LinkedIn:
“One of my favorite parts of teaching is being in a room with friends and colleagues who care deeply about improving cancer prevention.
I was excited to give a talk about gastric intestinal metaplasia and gastric cancer prevention in the United States, a topic I believe deserves much more attention in our specialty.
Gastric cancer is more common in the U.S. than esophageal cancer, with approximately 31,510 versus 22,530 new cases expected in 2026. Yet, in my experience, it receives far less attention in our conversations about prevention. Both deserve our focus, and high quality endoscopy is essential to both.
A recent U.S. multicenter study in Endoscopy by esteemed colleagues, including Butros Fakhoury , Madhav Desai, and their coauthors, brings the opportunity for improvement into focus: approximately one in ten patients diagnosed with upper GI cancer had undergone an endoscopy that did not diagnose cancer within the preceding three years. That finding should make all of us pause.
For me, this reinforces the need to rethink our approach to upper GI malignancies. We need better education on subtle lesions, careful and systematic inspection, and workflows that give us the time and tools to perform a thorough examination. We also need to make identifying patients at increased risk a more consistent part of our practice.
These are the conversations I love having with colleagues: how we turn what we are learning into better care for the next patient.
Congrats Neil Sharma, Mohit Girotra and Youssef Soliman on a great course.
What would you change first to make gastric cancer prevention a greater priority in U.S. gastroenterology?”
This also can be interesting:
KEYNOTE-859 4.5-Year Follow-Up: Pembrolizumab Plus Chemotherapy in HER2-Negative Gastric/GEJ Cancer
