Prognosis of colon cancer

Most patients are worried about the prognosis of colon cancer. Currently, there are several different ways to assess the patient’s prognosis, the most important of which is the analysis of the stage of the disease.

Stages

There are four stages of colon cancer:

• a tumour did not sprout through the wall of the intestine;
• distant metastases of a tumour;
• a tumour covers the entire thickness of the intestinal wall;
• a tumour spread to the lymph nodes.

Of course, with cancer in the first stage, the removal of a small tumour suggests a further favourable prognosis for colon cancer. In this case, almost all patients survived.

However, if a tumour grows in size or spreads to the lymph nodes, the prognosis worsens. Today, oncologists use a variety of treatments to improve the outcome of adjuvant chemotherapy. In metastatic disease, it is an actively developing, deadly cancer, and chemotherapy is necessary to increase overall survival.

Prognosis of colon cancer for survival evaluation

Not only has this indicator changed, but the quality of life of patients has also improved significantly, too. Medical practice is continuously developing. Doctors now own some clinical, pathological criteria, and when studying biomaterials with a microscope, specialists can determine the possible degree of aggressiveness of tumours, which are usually poorly differentiated.

The more a cyst has metastases, the worse the final prognosis. If cancer has penetrated the liver, lung, bone or brain, the disease is less treatable, and the forecast is not as favourable as in the case of single foci in the liver or lung.

Prognostic

At present, doctors are gaining more and more information about molecular markers, and patients can undergo an appropriate examination. The detection of a mutation in the BRAF gene indicates an unfavourable prognosis. It is always tricky for a doctor to tell a patient about this. However, he has the right to know about the existence of such a gene mutation and a poor prognosis; the good news is that modern science has developed medicines with targeted effects on this predictive marker.

Probably in the future, scientists will find even more prognostic markers to choose the optimal method for treating cancer and better understand how to select individual chemotherapy for each patient using targeted drugs explicitly designed for this mutation. The prognosis of colon cancer depends on many factors. Colonic irrigation and at all will help maintain the body in a healthy state and prevent the appearance of oncology.