The Regional Minister of Health of the Government of the Canary Islands, Esther Monzón, held a meeting with members of the Spanish Society of Digestive Pathology (SEPD), Daniel Ceballos and David Nicolás, who presented her with the details of the White Paper on Population Screening for Colorectal Cancer in Spain, a document promoted by the SEPD.

The meeting was also attended by the Director General of Health Care Programmes of the Canary Islands Health Service (SCS), Antonia María Pérez, and the head of the Functional Unit of Oncological Programmes of the same Directorate General, Mariola de la Vega, who participated telematically.

The White Paper on Colorectal Cancer Population Screening in Spain describes the current situation of colorectal cancer population screening programmes in Spain, carries out a detailed strategic analysis of these tools and offers consensus recommendations to optimise these programmes.

At the meeting they discussed the importance of adopting healthy lifestyle habits to prevent the onset of colon cancer, as well as the development of the Canary Islands' Colorectal Cancer Prevention Programme, a tool aimed at people between the ages of 50 and 69 and whose objective is the early detection of this pathology, considered to be the most common malignant tumour and the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths in Spain.

The implementation of the SCS's Colorectal Cancer Prevention Programme has enabled the detection of patients considered to be at high risk, who are referred to specific hospital consultations for this pathology.

If the disease is detected at an early stage, mortality can be reduced by up to 30 percent, an important figure considering that the average survival rate is around 55 percent in five years. Furthermore, the detection of precancerous lesions and the removal of the polyps that cause them means that in 90 percent of cases colon cancer does not develop.