No, not really. When you come to a specialist, it’s more of going through your symptoms and your risk factors.
If it’s bloating and nothing more, then we look at the risk factors. If you’re 20 years old, no family history, and just bloating for a short period of time, stomach cancer will be the last thing on my mind.
Whereas if you’re 50, you have acid reflux that’s constantly there despite medications, then it’s more worrying.
The preparations are for the specialist to assess you, then if it’s required we do a blood test, look at your blood count, make sure you’re not anaemic, then maybe do an endoscopy to test for the bacteria and look at the stomach lining itself.
So that’s where the screening comes in -- in the sense that sometimes we see cancer, sometimes we don’t. We see early changes in the stomach and that in itself is a warning sign that we have to do more of the screening on the patient.
