Patients with advanced colorectal cancer whose tumors have gotten smaller six weeks after starting treatment with Erbitux had a much longer time before their cancer got worse and almost twice the overall survival as patients whose tumors didn’t shrink.

Patients in the BOND study had already gotten worse on standard chemotherapy and were receiving either Erbitux® (cetuximab) alone or in combination with irinotecan.  CT scans  for about a third of them showed at least a 10 percent decrease in the size of their tumors six weeks into treatment. Read the rest of this entry »

Not having insurance reduces the chance that someone with colorectal cancer will live a year after their diagnosis.  Even when patients from 18 to 64 have other illnesses, their insurance status makes a difference in survival.

Risk of dying during that first year was 50 to 90 percent higher among the uninsured.  They were more likely to diagnosed at an advanced stage and live in poor neighborhoods.

Other illness (comorbidities) was lowest in privately insured patients and highest in patients under 65 on Medicare, who were likely to have Medicare because of a disability. Read the rest of this entry »

Five years after surgery, there was no improvement in either disease-free survival or overall survival when irinotecan was added to standard 5-FU treatments delivered via continous infusion for patients with stage III colon cancer.  Adding irinotecan increased the rate of serious side effects.

The PETACC-3  (Pan European Trial Adjuvant Colon Cancer)  trial was designed to see if adding irinotecan to 5-FU and leucovorin could increase the percentage of stage III patients who were alive and cancer-free (disease-free survival).  It also studied overall survival and relapse-free survival. Read the rest of this entry »

By studying changes in tumor tissue from colon cancer patients whose cancers had not spread to distant organs, researchers were able to isolate a gene mutation that led to a poor outcome.

Stage I through III colon cancer patients whose tumors had a mutation in the PIK3CA gene were more likely to die of colon cancer that patients with normal or wild-type PIK3CA.  About 1 in 5 patients had that mutation in tumor tissue.

After adjusting for other variables that affect death from colon cancer, patients with a PIK3CA mutation were more than twice as likely to die from colon cancer.  This was especially true in KRAS wild-type tumors where a PIK3CA mutation increased risk of death almost four times.  However, in KRAS mutated tumors, the presence of PIK3CA made little difference in cancer-specific survival. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »