The test is simple to do. The principle is to look for traces of blood in the stool, which are undetectable to the naked eye. This is an immunological test: you receive a small brush – like a ricil brush – you have to immerse it in the stool, put the brush in the appropriate tube and send it for analysis. This is a very precise test.
Attention, it is not because the test is positive that it is automatically a cancer. There are other reasons that can explain the presence of blood in the stool. But if the test is positive, you absolutely have to go back to your doctor. In this case, we will do a colonoscopy to see where the bleeding in the colon is coming from, via a tube.
Thanks to this test, we can detect a precancer. Some polyps can degenerate, become lesions and turn into cancer. Colorectal cancer takes regarding ten years to develop between pre-cancer and cancer. The important thing when doing this test is to do it every two years.
