Quantile-based fecal hemoglobin concentration for assessing colorectal neoplasms with 1,263,717 Taiwanese screenees

BACKGROUND: Although fecal hemoglobin concentration (f-Hb) was highly associated with the risk of colorectal neoplasms, current studies on this subject are hampered by skewedness of the data and the ordinal property of f-Hb has not been well studied yet. Our aim was to develop a quantile-based method to estimate adjusted percentiles (median) of fecal hemoglobin concentration and their derived prediction for the risk of multistage outcomes of colorectal disease. METHODS: We used a 6-year follow-up cohort of Taiwanese nationwide colorectal screening program with fecal immunochemical testing (FIT) to obtain fecal hemoglobin concentration and applied accelerated failure time multi-variable analyses to make the comparison of adjusted median and other percentitles of fecal hemoglobin across four categories of colorectal carcinogenesis. We then predicted the risk of colorectal neoplasms on the basis of the corresponding percentile values by using accelerated failure time model with Bayesian inversion method. RESULTS: The adjusted median fecal hemoglobin concentration of nonadvanced adenoma, advanced adenoma, and colorectal cancer were 57, 82, and 163 μg/g feces as opposed to 0 μg/g feces for the normal group. At 90 μg/g of f-Hb, the highly suspected cut-off for colorectal disease, the risks were 17% for non-advanced adenoma, 6% for advanced adenoma, and 9% for CRC. Life-time risks of each colorectal neoplasm were derived by percentiles of fecal hemoglobin concentration. CONCLUSION: Covariate-adjusted risk stratification for multistage outcomes of colorectal neoplasia were provided by using the quantiles of fecal hemoglobin concentration, yielding the estimated life-time risks of 25th to 75th quantitles, ranging from 0.5 to 44% for colorectal cancer, 0.2 to 46% for non-advanced adenoma, and 0.1 to 20% for advanced adenoma. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12911-019-0812-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.