Adverse histopathological findings as a guide to patient management after curative resection of node-positive colonic cancer.

BACKGROUND: The aim of this study was to identify patient and tumour characteristics that might assist in developing an improved approach to patient selection for chemotherapy after resection of clinicopathological stage C colonic cancer.
METHODS: Clinical, pathological and follow-up data have been collected prospectively for all patients undergoing resection for colorectal cancer at Concord Hospital since 1971. From an initial 2980 patients, after exclusions 378 remained who had a potentially curative operation for colonic cancer with nodal metastases and did not receive adjuvant chemotherapy. Associations between several pathological features and survival were examined by proportional hazards regression.
RESULTS: In a multivariate model, both overall and colonic cancer-specific survival rates were negatively associated with serosal surface involvement, apical node metastasis, high histological grade and venous invasion. The survival of patients with stage C disease who had none of these adverse features was not significantly different from that of patients with stage B lesions. However, survival diminished significantly when one or more of the adverse features were present.
CONCLUSION: Patients with a stage C tumour but with none of the identified adverse features experience relatively good survival and are unlikely to benefit from adjuvant chemotherapy. In this series such patients accounted for 40.5 per cent of patients with stage C disease. Copyright 2003 British Journal of Surgery Society Ltd.