What is the Effect of Surgery vs Surgery + Adjuvant Therapy on the Colorectal Patient Outcome?

Colorectal cancer is on the rise in North America—it now ranks third most prevalent among all cancers and second in mortality, affecting more than 140,000 people each year. Various treatment options are available to patients depending on the type of colorectal cancer they are diagnosed with and how far the disease has progressed. The current standard of care for localized colorectal cancer which has no lymphatic nodes and not yet metastasized (Stages I and II) is surgical removal of the initial tumor. For more advanced disease (Stages III and IV), with diagnosed lymphatic nodes or metastases, adjuvant therapy involving chemotherapy, radiation, or both is indicated in addition to surgery. In this study, we compared the effectiveness of these two treatment methods, surgery alone versus surgery plus adjuvant therapy. We also examined whether the type of cancer histology and the progression of disease (stage) affected patient outcomes and chances of survival in regards to the aforementioned treatment options. A cross-sectional analysis was conducted in which 24,979 individuals with colorectal cancer were studied. Our research determined that treatment outcomes are highly correlated with the type of cancer histology and the stage. We found that surgery alone was a more effective treatment than the combination of surgery with adjuvant therapy in cases of both localized papillary carcinoma and localized adenocarcinoma; however, physicians should consider the histological type and the progression of the cancer (stage) before deciding on the best treatment option for each individual patient.