This recent article from the National Institute for Health Research provides more positive coverage about The Cytosponge.  It summarises a large multicentre trial including 13,000 people, from 109 GP practices across England, who had all been taking heartburn medication for 6 months or more.

HCUK trustee Rebecca Fitzgerald is the study author.  She says:

We were delighted and surprised by the scale of the benefit. We expected to find more cases but to find ten times as many was unexpected. This is a really simple test that can be done in ten minutes in a GP surgery.

Some patients we diagnosed had signs of early cancer and so they could go and get treatment. It’s really fulfilling to be able to say that I met some of these patients who were truly grateful and that just makes it all worthwhile.”

As well as information in the article linked to above, there is lots more information about the cytosponge and a link to the full study report, in our earlier news article.