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 »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

The number of cancer tumor cells circulating in the bloodstream can provide information about prognosis and survival for people with metastatic colorectal cancer.  Measuring circulating tumor cells before beginning a treatment and then during treatment can help doctors decide if the therapy is working or whether cancer is getting worse.

Tumor cells can be found in the blood of cancer patients, but are very rare in healthy people.  Using a technique that identifies and magnetically separates circulating tumor cells, researchers were able to measure the number of circulating cells in a standard amount of blood. They measured circulating tumor cells before treatment began and again several times during treatment. Read the rest of this entry »

Another study has found better survival after a diagnosis of colorectal cancer in younger women. Among over two thousand colon and rectal cancer patients In Australia, women under the age of 50 had about half the risk of dying from colorectal cancer than men under 50. Better survival held true despite where the cancer was found, its stage or grade, and whether emergency surgery was necessary to treat it.

However, women over 50 had about 40 percent poorer survival than men over 50.  Again, stage, site, or grade at the time of diagnosis didn’t matter. Read the rest of this entry »

XELOX, as second-line therapy, was found to be as effective as the more commonly used FOLFOX treatment for patients whose cancer had already gotten worse on treatment with Camptosar® (irinotecan).

XELOX combines an oral drug Xeloda® (capecitabine) with Eloxatin® (oxaliplatin).  FOLFOX uses an infusional schedule of 5FU and leucovorin.

Researchers randomly compared XELOX to FOLFOX4 to treat 627 patients with metastatic colorectal cancer.  Patients had already received initial therapy with Camptosar and either had their cancer progress or were unable to tolerate the treatments.  Although outcomes were similar for the two regimens, side effects differed.

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