Upper gastrointestinal mass survey with panendoscopy in a workplace.

We performed a mass survey using a thin forward-viewing gastroscope (Olympus GIF-P2) as a secondary examination of 449 persons from 3457 employees who had undergone the first step of the screening with photofluorography. Comparing these results with those obtained in the mass survey of 1976 and 1977, in which the lateral-viewing gastrocamera, GT-PA2, was employed for the second step of the screening in 372 of 3548 persons examined, we arrived at the following conclusions: (1) the thin forward-viewing gastroscope for mass survey permits accurate diagnosis not only of gastric lesions but also of bulbar lesions; (2) there was no significant difference between the two mass surveys in the rate of discovery of gastric lesions, but gastric ulcer scars were detected at higher rate when using the gastrocamera; and (3) few lesions were noted in cases with an incompletely filled bulb; gastric erosions, especially prepyloric, were noted with bulbar deformity.