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Suggest Treatment For Stage 3 Colon Cancer
Question: My dad has his pathology report verbally following colon cancer surgery
It's a t3 tumor which they say is contained within bowel.
Stage is dukes c1
28 nodes taken out and 10 close to tumor affected only.
They say too
Nodes were not affected - what do they mean by this ?
What is cure / survival likd for c1?
Brief Answer:
Considerations.
Detailed Answer:
Hello and thank you for sending the question.
This is an excellent question and I will work on providing you with some information and recommendations.
From the information you have submitted it does appear that your father has at least stage III Colon cancer. In this type of going cancer lymph nodes are typically involved.
What would be important is to perform full stage in. This would include a CT scan of the rest of the body including the chest abdomen and pelvis. If all of the rest of the body is negative for evidence of any additional cancer then systemic chemotherapy may provide a significant survival benefit.
it is nearly impossible to predict how long someone may live after a diagnosis of cancer. What is important is for your father and family to sit down with a medical oncologist to design an appropriate treatment regimen which will provide adequate survival benefit without significant toxicity's which may severely limit his quality-of-life.
We know have very good systemic chemotherapy which provides excellent results and very good long-term survival benefit.
if he is otherwise relatively healthy he would be a candidate for systemic chemotherapy.
Thanks again for sharing your healthcare concerns with us. Please let me know if there are any specific questions related to this that you would like to review with me.
Sincerely,
Dr. Galamaga
Hematologist and Medical Oncologist
Above answer was peer-reviewed by :
Dr. Chakravarthy Mazumdar
Hi he's been told it is a duke c1.
Are 10 nodes a lot ? But they did say that 10 were close ones only no distance ones .
A ct scan
Was done in dec 13 and feb 26 which was all clear Apparantly . But my worry is can mets still appear ?
Should we request a pet scan or?
He has gone weak after surgery and not able to eat hardly so lost weight a lot . Would this affect chemo ?
Brief Answer:
Followup
Detailed Answer:
Thanks for the followup,
The answer is yes - mets can still appear even if not seen on a CT or PET scan. This is generally why we consider systemic chemotherapy in this setting.
The idea of chemo is to eliminate any remaining cancer cells that may have escaped the surgeons scalpel. This is especialy important in this stage of disease because we know that many lymph nodes were involved.
10 is a significant number of lymph nodes and I would strongly encourage a detailed discussion with your medical oncologist to review systemic treatment options.
The PET will not likely be helpful in this setting at this time.
Sincerely,
Dr. Galamaga
Note: For further queries related to kidney problems Click here.
Above answer was peer-reviewed by :
Dr. Chakravarthy Mazumdar
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