CHOOSING LONDON FOR HEALTHCARE
COMMITTED TO A BETTER PATIENT EXPERIENCE Consultant Gastroenterologist Professor Julian Teare talks about how the OneWelbeck Digestive Health Centre is focused on providing the best possible patient experience
What is your medical specialty and on what areas are you focused? I am a gastroenterologist, so I have a special interest in diseases of the gut. My main interest is diseases of the stomach: stomach ulceration, reflux disease and diseases of the colon, colitis, Crohn's disease and bowel cancer. When we investigate for these diseases, we’re looking for signs of inflammation, for those with colitis and Crohn's disease, and for polyps and bowel cancer. One of the big developments over the past decade or more has been to screen people in their 50s to find polyps, because for 95% of people that have bowel cancer, it begins with a polyp. These polyps increase in size over many years and can turn into cancer, so if polyps are detected and removed then we can prevent the development
of the disease. In countries that have adopted screening programmes with colonoscopy – such as the United States, where about half the population has been screened – instances of colon cancer have fallen by more than 40%. I also have a research laboratory where we investigate what drives the formation of polyps and what leads some polyps to turn into bowel cancer. About 40% of people at colonoscopy have a polyp, and most of these will never develop into cancer. For those polyps that do develop into cancer, we are exploring why this occurs – for instance, something present in the gut or for dietary reasons. Statistics show that a case of bowel cancer is found in every 121 procedures, and that the disease is prevented with
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