Most colorectal cancer screening strategies would save healthcare systems money by picking up cases at an earlier stage and preventing the need for costly chemotherapeutic drugs, which have recently become available, a study has found.

The United States used a microsimulation model to assess whether the increasing use of new, costly drugs would affect the treatment savings that could be achieved by colorectal cancer screening (J Natl Cancer Inst 2009 doi:10.1093/jnci/djp319). The MISCAN-Colon model—the colorectal version of a model previously used to evaluate screening programmes for breast, cervical, and prostate cancer—simulates …