European Polyp Surveillance Trial

This protocol describes the epos (ancient greek (Επος) for "story") of a group of related clinical trials aiming at addressing one of the most important unsolved challenges in the prevention of colorectal cancer (one of our major cancer killers); the surveillance of patients with premalignant polyps in the large bowel.

This project is timely because large scale colorectal cancer screening programmes are currently rolled out in most Western countries. These programmes are diagnosing large numbers of individuals with premalignant polyps (adenomas and serrated polyps). This creates both a diagnostic and resource dilemma, because the optimal surveillance strategy for these individuals to reduce future cancer risk is currently unknown..

The EPoS trials will randomize or register more than 20,000 individuals in different European countries to different surveillance colonoscopy intervals to disentangle the most effective and cost-effective surveillance strategy for the population. Subjects will be randomized according to their presenting polyp chracteristics The EPoS I trial randomizes patients with low-risk adenomas into 5 or 10-year surveillance; ; EPoS II randomizes patients with high-risk adenomas into 3 or 5-yearly surveillance ; EPoS III will include patients with serrated polyps in a one-arm study with surveillance after 5 and 10 years. The primary endpoint for all three trials is incidence of colorectal cancer after 10 years of follow-up.

This EPoS trials are the largest in polyp surveillance ever conducted. They address a clinical problem affecting hundreds of thousand individuals in Europe and the US each year, it has a large size, and should thus provide definitive results.