Colon Cancer – Statistics

Transcript

Colon cancer survival really depends on the stage of the colon cancer and how early we find the cancer. Obviously, the earlier the stage, the better the survival. For example, for stage one colon cancer patients, surgery alone can be curative in most patients over 90%. With stage two disease, again we have very high cure rates with surgery alone and sometimes we do offer some chemotherapy afterwards depending on what we find on pathology. For stage three patients, we always offer chemotherapy after surgery and we can raise the cure rates from about 50 to 60% with surgery alone, up to about 80, 85% with surgery combined with some form of chemotherapy after surgery. Stage four patients – we don’t really discuss cure because it’s hard to cure a patient with stage four cancer. Sometimes, we shoot for that, but again, often, all we can do to stabilize patients and keep them in remission. When I was in training, survival for stage four patients was about six to nine months life expectancy. These days, we talk about a few years life expectancy because of all of the nutritional options that you have available. I’ve seen patients that have survived four or five years or even longer and some have gone into remission for many years.