A committee of experts that advises the Food and Drug Administration voted by large majorities on Thursday that a new blood test to screen people for colon and rectal cancers was safe and effective, and that its benefits outweighed its risks. But the group cautioned that the blood test had limitations and added that they were endorsing it with the hope that it would increase the abysmally low number of people who are regularly screened for this cancer. The F.D.A. usually follows the advice of its expert committees.
The test, said Charity J. Morgan, a committee member who is a biostatistics professor at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, “is better than nothing for patients who are getting nothing, but it is not better than a colonoscopy.”