For patients at high risk of esophageal cancer, doctors should also consider endoscopy for early cancer detection. A health risk assessment tool to select candidates for endoscopic cancer screening, including data on alcohol flushing as well as alcohol consumption, smoking, and dietary habits, is currently being developed and validated [31]. Using a version of the health risk assessment that includes the flushing questionnaire as a major component, it has been estimated that approximately 58% of esophageal cancers in the Japanese population could be detected by screening only the individuals with the top 10% risk scores [31].
