Avoiding major surgical operations in early colorectal cancer.
This aim of this research is to see if it is possible to help patients with early bowel cancer from having a major operation.
Identification of early bowel cancer has increased three fold (5% to 16.9%) due to screening for blood in poo. However early bowel cancer is frequently treated with a major operation leading to 1-4% deaths, loss of the anus, 30% complications, 75% significant disturbance of toilet habit and the need for a colostomy bag and other complications.
This research, which is being run by pathologists, will see if certain factors influence the long term prognosis for patients. Using early cancers with and without lymph node spread they will look for new pathology tests to identify those individuals that have a low risk of spread that will avoid the need for major operations.
They will use two series of cases: one from Leeds and one from Denmark; one to develop the tests and the second to validate them before being tested in the screening programme.
References:
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- Chambers PA. Stead LF. Morgan JE. Carr IM. Sutton KM. Watson CM. Crowe V. Dickinson H. Roberts P. Mulatero C. Seymour M. Markham AF. Warning PM. Quirke P & Taylor GR. Mu-tation Detection by Clonal Sequencing of PCR Amplicons and Grouped Read Typing is Appli-cable to Clinical Diagnostics. Human mutation, 34, 248-254, 2013.