Dyspepsia in coalminers and the general population: a comparative study.

Coalminers have an increased incidence of gastric cancer' 2 with an overall excess mortality of 30-50%, rising as high as fivefold in parts of south Wales.3 If screening for gastric cancer is to be cost effective in the West high risk groups will probably need to be identified and if dyspepsia is to be used to identify a particularly high risk group, such as coalminers, then we must know the rate ofdyspepsia in the group we are studying and the extent to which it differs from the general population. We have therefore studied a group of coalminers and an age and sex matched group of subjects from the general population to see if the rates ofdyspepsia differ between the two groups with a view to screening this high risk group for gastric cancer.