Colorectal Cancer Screening in Average Risk Populations: Evidence Summary

Table 6

GRADE evidence profile—colonoscopy and CRC-related mortality and incidence.

Quality assessment							Effect	Quality	Importance
Number of studies	Design	Risk of bias	Inconsistency	Indirectness	Imprecision	Other considerations	Relative (95% CI)
CRC mortality (from Brenner et al. 2014) [29]
3	Observational studies	Serious^1	Not serious	Not serious	Not serious	Not serious	RR 0.32 (0.23–0.43)	⨁◯◯◯; Very low	Critical
Complications from tests (perforations, bleeding, and deaths)
15	Observational studies	Not serious	Not serious	Not serious	Not serious	Not serious	N/A^2	⨁⨁◯◯; Low	Critical
CRC incidence (from Brenner et al. 2014) [29]
5	Observational studies	Serious^1	Serious^3	Not serious	Not serious	Not serious	RR 0.31 (0.12 to 0.77)	⨁◯◯◯; Very low	Important

CI: confidence interval; CRC: colorectal cancer; GRADE: Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development and Evaluations; N/A: not applicable.
¹Mixed study designs included case-control and retrospective.
²The risks of perforation or bleeding were less than 1% ranging from 0% to 0.22% for perforations and 0% to 0.19% for bleeding.
³Heterogeneity: Tau² = 1.0; (); = 94%.