Screening detects bowel cancer or pre-cancerous tumours in 14pc of participants

More than 14 per cent of Hong Kong people aged 50 to 70 may have bowel cancer or its precursor without knowing it, according to a Chinese University screening programme.

The programme tested almost 11,000 people without symptoms and one-seventh were found to have the cancer - the most common in Hong Kong - or precancerous growths called polyps, higher than in most Asian regions.

The results were revealed yesterday, a few days after Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying announced a subsidised screening programme for the disease in his policy address.

The researchers said global experience was that early detection by the two screening methods used in the tests could reduce the number of deaths by 33 per cent to 68 per cent, as it could take up to 10 years for polyps to progress into cancer.

The results showed the prevalence of the disease is split almost equally between men and women - in contrast to the international trend for more men than women to be affected. But the researchers said this might be because more women than men volunteered for the programme.

"God is unfair - men have a higher risk of having bowel cancer," Professor Justin Wu Che-yuen, director of the university's Institute of Integrative Medicine, said. "But we can't blame it all on God because men are usually less concerned about their health, as we can see from this programme."

Bowel cancer has overtaken lung cancer as the most common variant of the disease in Hong Kong, with 4,450 new cases and 1,900 deaths in 2011, but it still remains the second biggest killer behind lung cancer.