I, Yoko SAITO, MD. PhD from Ibarakiken Medical Center, have been appointed as the president of the 56th General Meeting of the Japanese Society of Gastrointestinal Cancer Screening (JSGCS), which is held in Kobe city on 1st November during the 26th Japan Digestive Disease Week (JDDW) from 1st to 4th November 2018. It is a great honor for me to hold the JSGCS annual conference, which has a long standing history.

I’ve made the main theme of the 2018 annual meeting “Toward a world leader in high-quality gastrointestinal screening” with hope. Most importantly in order to decrease the gastrointestinal cancer death rate, we develop the effective cancer screening based on scientific evidence and offer the system so that every person in need can join the screening. In addition, the screening system provided by the government or the municipalities as the public service also requires that it promotes public interest. In the recent years, the method of the endoscopic screening has been accepted as an organized screening for gastric cancer. Before the system began, the X-ray method was the only accepted method. There are, thus, only a few municipalities, which perform endoscopic gastric cancer screening. In starting the endoscopic screening, there are some issues to be resolved, which make it difficult, as of now, to adopt endoscopic gastric cancer screening as the public service. Also, it was proved that almost all gastric cancers were from Helicobacter pylori infectious gastritis. Therefore, the consideration of the risk of gastric mucosa in deciding whether or not to bring the participants to gastric cancer screening will be included in the system because it is more effective and there are a limited number of doctors who can perform endoscopy for screening. Like the endoscopic gastric cancer screening , in colorectal cancer screening with FIT, there is a problem associated with the recommendation that the total colonoscopy is required in case of positive FIT.　Under these circumstances, two main sessions are planned. One is “The concept of gastric cancer screening as the public policy - The present and future -” and the other is “The role of colonoscopy and CT colonography for colorectal cancer screening.”

Furthermore, three special guests will give us informative talks. The first is Dr. Yeol Kim from National Cancer Center, Republic of Korea, who is going to talk about stomach cancer screening by endoscopy, the second is Dr. Stephen P. Halloran from Surrey University of England, who is going to talk about colorectal cancer screening, and the third is Dr. Masako Minooka from Japan Association for Clinical Ethics, who is going to talk about clinical ethics. There are many more joint sessions scheduled to be held with other societies in addition to ours.

I am going to hold a productive JSGCS annual conference with the cooperation on other 4 associations that constitute JDDW while keeping the originality of JSGCS. I hope many doctors who participate in JDDW are interested in not only digestive diseases and therapies, but also the gastrointestinal cancer screening.

I cordially request you to make presentations and look forward to attending JDDW 2018.