Mayo Clinic Health Manager
Get free personalized health guidance for you and your family.
Get Started
About our e-newsletters
- Free e-newsletters
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- We do not share your e-mail address
Housecall, our weekly general-interest e-newsletter, keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics with timely, reliable, practical information, recipes, blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts and more. Our biweekly topic-specific e-newsletters also include blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts, and other useful information that will help you manage your health.
Housecall Archives
Mayo Clinic Housecall
Stay up to date on the latest health information.
What you get
- Free weekly e-newsletter
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- Recipes, tools and other helpful information
- We do not share your e-mail address
What you can expect
By Mayo Clinic staff
Typically, your doctor will provide a fecal occult blood test kit to be used at home. You also can buy over-the-counter test kits at most pharmacies.
With some kits, you'll collect a stool sample and store it in a supplied container. With other kits, you'll use an applicator stick to smear the sample on a chemically treated card. In some cases, you may be able to use flushable pads that detect occult blood in the toilet bowl after a bowel movement, without the need to collect stool samples. Because cancers may bleed intermittently, you'll generally be asked to take stool samples on two or three consecutive days.
After you collect the samples, you'll deliver them to a lab or your doctor's office — either by mail or in person. The samples will be treated with a special chemical. If blood is present, the chemical reacts and appears as a different color from the rest of the sample. For accurate results, it's important to return the samples promptly.
- Levin B, et al. Screening and surveillance for the early detection of colorectal cancer and adenomatous polyps, 2008: A joint guideline from the American Cancer Society, the US Multi-Society Task Force on Colorectal Cancer, and the American College of Radiology. Gastroenterology. 2008;134:1570.
- Hundt S, et al. Comparative evaluation of immunochemical fecal occult blood tests for colorectal adenoma detection. Annals of Internal Medicine. 2009;150:162.
- Fecal occult blood test: The test sample. American Association for Clinical Chemistry. http://www.labtestsonline.org/understanding/analytes/fecal_occult_blood/sample.html. Accessed March 12, 2009.
- Fecal occult blood test: The test. American Association for Clinical Chemistry. http://www.labtestsonline.org/understanding/analytes/fecal_occult_blood/test.html. Accessed March 12, 2009.
- Bynum TE. Evaluation of occult gastrointestinal bleeding. http://www.uptodate.com/home/index.html. Accessed March 12, 2009.
- Pignone M, et al. Meta-analysis of dietary restriction during fecal occult blood testing. Effective Clinical Practice. 2001;4:150.
- Van Rossum LG, et al. Random comparison of guaiac and immunochemical fecal occult blood tests for colorectal cancer in a screening population. Gastroenterology. 2008;135:82.
