Colon and rectal cancer that is attached to critical body structures like the wall of the pelvis or important large veins has traditionally been considered not surgically treatable.  Patients have been offered palliative treatments designed to extend life or reduce symptoms, but the goal wasn’t cure.

However, Mayo Clinic surgeons are now working together with teams of surgeons, radiologists, and oncologists to treat normally unresectable colon and rectal cancer with a combination of therapies.  Surgery, both external radiation and radiotherapy done during surgery, and chemotherapy have gone beyond palliative care for this group of patients.  Almost half of the patients treated with the multimodality approach were alive and cancer free five years after treatment began.

Writing in the Annals of Surgery, the doctors titled their article, Unresectable Colorectal Cancer Can Be Cured With Multimodality Therapy. Read the rest of this entry »

Patients who had surgery for colon or rectal cancer performed at a National Cancer Institute Designated Center had less risk of death immediately after surgery and better long-term survival.

Looking at nearly 34,000 people who had surgery for colon cancer and 8,600 who had rectal cancer surgery, researchers found a 26 percent increase in long term survival when the operation was done in an NCI-designated cancer center.

Having surgery in an NCI-designated center cut the risk of dying in the hospital or within 30 days after surgery in half for colon cancer patients.  Post surgery deaths were 6.7 percent in non-NCI centers and 3.2 percent in NCI-designated centers.  There was even more difference for rectal cancer where deaths after surgery were 5 percent in non-NCI and 1.9 percent in NCI centers. Read the rest of this entry »

Are we making progress in treating colon and pancreatic cancer?  An audio webcast with Dr. David Mahvi, surgeon at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, will help answer that question.

• Treatment of Colon Cancer and Pancreatic Cancer: Are We Making Progress?
• David Mahvi, M.D.
• Tuesday, October 14, 2008.
• 7 p.m.
• Northwestern Memorial webcasts Read the rest of this entry »

Although giving radiation before rectal cancer surgery reduces the risk that cancer will return in the rectum and nearby tissues, it does so at a cost.  Quality-of-life studies that accompanied a trial of a short course of radiation therapy before surgery  found more sexual and bowel problems with presurgical radiation. Read the rest of this entry »

Patients who received chemotherapy after surgery to remove colorectal cancer that had spread to their liver or lungs had better long-term outcomes than those who only had surgery, according to an analysis that pooled two similar studies.

Two different clinical trials studied chemotherapy after surgical removal of liver or lung metastases due to colorectal cancer.  While neither trial was large enough to draw clear conclusions on its own, researchers combined information from both to decide if chemo made a difference for patients. Read the rest of this entry »