Wendy Atkin
Epidemiologist who improved testing for bowel cancer
WENDY ATKIN, the former Professor of Gastrointestinal Epidemiology at Imperial College London, who has died aged 71, led a landmark randomised controlled trial to assess whether the incidence of colorectal cancer and related deaths could be reduced with a screening technique called flexible sigmoidoscopy.
This involves using a thin, flexible tube with a small camera and light at the end of it to look inside the lower part of the bowel – the rectum and sigmoid colon.
Bowel cancer is the third most common type of cancer in England, affecting some 31,000 people and causing about 13,000 deaths each year. The study, carried out between 1994 and 1999, recruited healthy adults aged 55-64 from 14 locations across Britain, who had no family history of bowel disease or cancer, no symptoms suggestive of cancer and had not had a sigmoidoscopy or colonoscopy in the previous three years.
The results, published in the Lancet in 2010, found that 11 years after a single flexible sigmoidoscopy screening, those who took up the offer were 33 per cent less likely to develop bowel cancer and 43 per cent less likely to die from it than those not invited for screening.
Describing the research, The Daily Telegraph estimated that offering the one-off test to people aged 55 could save 3,000 lives a year and prevent a further 5,000 people from developing bowel cancer.
The researchers concluded that “flexible sigmoidoscopy is a safe and practical test” and that offering a single test between the ages of 55 and 64 “confers a substantial and long lasting benefit”.
In October 2010 the Government allocated £60 million to a new flexible sigmoidoscopy screening programme for people in England aged over 55 years. In 2017, however, it was reported that plans to roll out the programme across the country had run into delays owing to a shortage of trained endoscopists, and the failure of authorities in other parts of the UK to confirm that the technique would become part of their screening programmes.
She was born Wendy Sheila Green in London on April 5 1947. After qualifying at the Chelsea School of Pharmacy, she worked during the 1970s as a clinical research executive at the Wellcome Foundation and then at the Roussel Laboratories in Middlesex.
After that she crossed over to the United States to take a Master’s degree in Public Health Epidemiology at Columbia University, New York.
Back in England Wendy Atkin worked for the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, then became a clinical research fellow at St Mark’s Hospital, London. She was awarded a PHD from University College London in 1991 for her research on the long-term risk of colorectal cancer following the removal of adenomas (benign tumours).
She rose in 1997 to become deputy director of the Colorectal Cancer Unit at Cancer Research UK at St Mark’s, and the same year she was appointed senior lecturer at Imperial College London, rising to professor in 2004.
In 2002 she developed the first UK guidelines on colonoscopy surveillance for people with colorectal adenomas, which were also adopted, with slight modification, by the EU.
In 2008 she moved to St Mary’s Hospital, London, where she established the Cancer Screening and Prevention Research Group, leading it until earlier this year when she retired due to ill health.
A regular speaker at cancer conferences, she also advised other countries about colorectal cancer screening programmes and collaborated with those involved in breast and pancreatic cancer screening.
In 2013 Wendy Atkin was appointed OBE for services to bowel cancer prevention. She was elected a fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2015.
In 1971 she married Peter Atkin, with whom she had a son and a daughter.
Wendy Atkin, born April 5 1947, died October 2 2018