Lack of Insurance Impacts Survival in CRC Patients Under 65.

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. Continue reading…

Posted by Kate Murphy on August 1st, 2009
Posted in: Research & Treatment News | 2 Comments »
Tags: disparities, Medicaid, Medicare, private insurance, survival

Adding Irinotecan to Infusional 5-FU Does Not Add Benefit for Stage III Colon Cancer

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. Continue reading…

Posted by Kate Murphy on May 19th, 2009
Posted in: Research & Treatment News | No Comments »
Tags: irinotecan, stage III colon cancer, survival

Tumor Mutation Predicts Poor Prognosis in Stage I-III Colon Cancer

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. Continue reading…

Posted by Kate Murphy on March 19th, 2009
Posted in: Research & Treatment News | 2 Comments »
Tags: prognosis, survival

Aggressive Treatment Leads to Cures for Colon and Rectal Cancers

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. Continue reading…

Posted by Kate Murphy on November 3rd, 2008
Posted in: Research & Treatment News | 4 Comments »
Tags: surgery, survival

Depression Can Hasten Cancer Death

Depressed patients with advanced cancer die sooner than those who are not depressed.  The more serious the depression, the more likely they are to die prematurely.

Researchers in the United Kingdom screened cancer patients for depression using tests that were originally designed to diagnose depression in women after childbirth.  They looked at feelings of worthlessness and sadness and thoughts of suicide, as well as measuring pain and cancer symptoms.  They found a little less than one-third (29 percent) of advanced cancer patients were depressed.  Six months later half of those identified patients who were still alive remained depressed. Continue reading…

Posted by Kate Murphy on August 10th, 2008
Posted in: Research & Treatment News | No Comments »
Tags: depression, palliative care, survival