Adjuvant treatment
Adjuvant treatment is treatment given after primary treatment (eg. surgery).
Types of adjuvant treatment for cancer are chemotherapy, radiotherapy, hormonal therapy, targeted therapy and biologic therapy.
Why is adjuvant treatment important?
Even if the surgery was successful at removing all visible tumor, microscopic cancer cells that cannot be seen by surgeon can be missed, especially in more advanced cancer stage.
In colorectal cancer, adjuvant chemotherapy helped to lower disease recurrence, increase cure rate and survival, especially in more advanced cancer stage.
Multiple studies showed clear benefit of adjuvant chemotherapy in stage III and also in ‘high-risk’ stage II colorectal cancer.
‘High-risk’ stage II are
- positive/ close resection margin
- lymph nodes sampling <12
- poorly differentiated tumour
- vascular or lymphatic or perineural invasion
- tumour presentation with obstruction or tumour perforation
- pT4 stage
Finally
Adjuvant chemotherapy is not offered to all patients.
It’s only for selected group of colorectal cancer patients (stage III, ‘high-risk’ stage II) who derives most benefit from it based on multiple clinical trials.
I always find it odd that patients dare to undergo surgery for hours to resect the tumor out but are scared of chemotherapy, which is just infusion of medicine.
They should join some support groups and hear from real patients who had successfully completed chemotherapy (most of them tolerate chemotherapy well) instead of basing their perception of chemotherapy from television or from those who have never undergo chemotherapy treatment before.
Will you refuse six months of adjuvant chemotherapy for CRC if it can allow you to live more than 10-years?
