The 54th General Meeting of Coloproctology Center, Takano Hospital |
 |
It is my great honor to act as president of the 54th General Meeting of the Japanese Society of Gastrointestinal Cancer Screening. The general meeting is to be held on November 3rd and rest of the conference will continue until November 6th, 2016 in Kobe.
The main theme of the 2016 meeting is “Contribution to Gastroenterology Brought on by the Progress of Cancer Screening”. The aim of cancer screening is to decrease the death rate by offering effective cancer screening to a lot of people. It is our society’s mission to promote screening and to produce positive results based on scientific evidence. Cancer screening for the digestive system largely covers three main areas; the stomach, the large intestine and the liver-gallbladder-pancreas. Countermeasures for cancer are enormously important to JDDW’s four member societies, and I believe it is our common goal that we all cooperate and tackle together. Recently, the body of evidence for cancer screening is accumulating and a variety of promising modalities for screening have become available. Considering these points, I have put my beliefs into the main theme, that “the progress of cancer screening will contribute to the development of gastroenterology”.
We scheduled two sessions for the 2016 JDDW meeting with the following two themes, “Current Condition and Measure of Population-based Screening with Gastroendoscopy” and “Accuracy Management of Colonoscopy Screening”. I am certain that these are important topics to discuss at this time, especially since the effectiveness of endoscopic screening is clear and has become a valuable countermeasure for cancer. I expect many useful scientific findings will be presented at this conference and will add to the necessity of conducting gastroendoscopy screening. Since Korea has established gastric cancer screening as a successful national project, we will welcome Professor Il Ju Choi (National Cancer Center) from Korea to join the session and to discuss the above mentioned theme from an international perspective. Colonoscopy is the most effective procedure for colorectal cancer screening, and it has come to be considered a population-based screening procedure. Quality indicator is identified as a result of research for quality assurance for endoscopic procedure in Western societies. Quality assurance for endoscopic procedure, which is relatively new in Japan, is also very important to Japan as a world-leader in the field of endoscopic research. I am looking forward to active and fruitful debates.
In addition, we will invite Professor R.J.C. Steele (University of Dundee) from the United Kingdom to talk to us about the “National Colorectal Cancer Screening Program in the UK”. I am confident that it will inspire us to further develop the cancer screening program in Japan. There are many more joint sessions scheduled to be held by other member societies in addition to ours. These sessions will offer participants a great opportunity to obtain up-to-date knowledge of gastroenterology in Japan.
APDW 2016 is to be held with JDDW 2016 for the first time in nine years. More than 2,000 overseas participants and over 20,000 participants within Japan are expected to attend. The Japanese Society of Gastrointestinal Cancer Screening will work closely with the other four member societies to create a successful JDDW event. I would like to encourage many fellow members to submit papers to either the general sessions or to the theme sessions.
