European guidelines and quality assurance on primary prevention of gastric cancer and third report on the status of implementation of the Council Recommendations on cancer screening

ongoing

Gastric cancer remains a major public health challenge worldwide, causing the loss of 19 million disability-adjusted life years worldwide. In Europe, there is significant geographical variation in gastric cancer incidence, with the highest burden in Eastern Europe. Following Europe's Beating Cancer Plan and subsequent recommendations by the European Council, population-based H. pylori screening and treatment programmes have been emphasised for gastric cancer prevention, which need to be guided by independent, evidence-based science and knowledge. In 2008 and 2017, IARC led the publication of the first and second reports on the status of implementation of the Council Recommendations on cancer screening. The IARC-led CanScreen-ECIS project identified and defined prioritised, responsive, and feasible KPIs for breast, cervical, colorectal, and lung cancer screening for the EU. Data collection and visualisation tools were developed and aligned with the European Cancer Information System (ECIS). Following the CanScreen-ECIS project and the piloting of the full data submission process, the third report will be produced. Our project titled “European guidelines and quality assurance on primary prevention of gastric cancer and the third cancer screening report” aims: 1) to develop the guidelines on population-based H. pylori screen-and-treat programme as the main strategy for primary prevention of gastric cancer for the European context and carry out preparatory work for developing European quality assurance schemes on primary prevention of gastric cancer as part of the European Commission Initiative on Gastric Cancer; and 2) to publish the third EU Cancer Screening Report and share data with ECIS for visualization of the performance of programmes. Thus, our project supports the new EU approach on cancer screening as part of the new EU Cancer Screening Scheme, one of the flagship initiatives of Europe’s Beating Cancer Plan.