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Charlotte Wang

Colorectal Cancer and Prognosis

As we know, among the amounts of cancers in the world, the most common cancer that occurs in China is lung cancer. According to the research in 2022, there will be 4,820,000 new cancer cases in China. Fortunately, the happening rate of cancers such as liver, stomach, and esophageal cancers is decreasing over time. However, the rate of getting colorectal cancer is increasing. This cancer called colorectal cancer is the name which is related to colon and rectal cancer. When we talk about cancer, there is a point that can come out quickly that cells are growing out of control, which then leads to cancer. That is true, colorectal cancer occurs because the cells that grow in the colon, which is the beginning part of our large intestine or rectum are out of control. And this kind of cancer often happens among the elderly. Based on research, the average ages are 68 in men and 72 in women. From the perspective of generally, polyps are not cancerous. What’s more, unlike other cancers or diseases, polyps usually would not cause other symptoms to occur. However, there are still some of them that can lead to cancer. But you do not have to worry about that as the prognosis of colorectal is very well and compared with other cancers’ 5-year relative survival rate, colon cancers’ all SEER stages combined rate is sixty-three percent. If you get a localized SEER stage, the survival rate can be reached 91 percent high.

There is no research or studies that show what would cause colorectal cancer. But we can from different aspects to analyze the reasons likely to get colon cancer, such as people’s lifestyles, gene mutations, and other environmental factors. To be more specific, studies indicate that one who is overweight or smoking has a higher risk of getting colon cancer. If let us think about why a person would be overweight, I would argue that most of them would say that he or she definitely does not have a healthy diet and often eat food with high fat and low fiber and they have a secondary life. According to the picture, we can analyze that colon cancer is the most common in those developed countries. European countries are dominant. And the highest population who would likely get this cancer happens in Australia and New Zealand. On the other hand, South-Central Asia such as Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, which are all developing countries and people who live there have low income, have the lowest rate of getting colon cancer. In addition, smoking, and drinking alcohol can also lead to a higher risk. As I mentioned above, the rate of getting colon cancer in China is increasing, and based on statistics provided by nature, in the past 12 months, the consumption of alcohol among Chinese men increased from 59 percent to 85 percent. Furthermore, alcohol consumption yearly per capita has increased from 7.1 to 11.2 liters between 1990 and 2017 and this number may still increase over time. Therefore, this may be one of the reasons that cause more people to get colon cancer in China.

In cancer centers, doctors would usually discuss together to come up with the best treatment for patients to reduce the sideways to them. There are many different ways and methods to deal with colorectal cancer, including surgery, chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and so on, which depends on the severity and SEER stages of colorectal cancer. One of the most common way and well-known methods is surgery. Doctors usually remove the tumor and some tissues that surround the tumor during surgery. However, you may probably not know that there also have three options in surgery, including Laparoscopic surgery, which only needs to cut small incisions on the abdomen. And compared with the traditional surgery, this needs less time for to patients recover with the same efficiency as traditional one. Besides, Colostomy for rectal cancer and radiofrequency ablation or cryoablation included insurgent options, but they are less often used to treat patients. However, surgeries have some side effects, including diarrhea and constipation.


To begin with, we need to have some basic information about survival rates. And most people would confuse this concept. Taking an example to illustrate this concept, as I said, the combined survival rate of colorectal cancer is about 63 percent in a 5-year relative survival rate. That means there are roughly 63 percent of people who are treated 5 years later are still alive. In addition, average statistics cannot indicate your life expectancy and different people may treat you with different methods. These will affect the data, and with the development of medical technology, the newest treatment may not be included in the data yet. Besides, many factors will influence the quality of prognosis, including the stages of colon cancer, which have five stages and they have different survival rates, stage 0 and 1 has the highest survival rate, which is 91 percent. As time goes on, the stage decreases. Stage 2 and 3 is 72 percent and stage 4 has only 14 percent. Blockage of the colon and your general health are also factors that impact the survival rate.

After being treated with colorectal cancer, there have probably that this cancer would be a recurrence and there are two types of recurrence of colorectal cancer, local recurrence and distant recurrence. The first one has only less than one percent of recurrence, which happened based on the tumor did not remove completely. However, these cases occur very rarely. On the other hand, distant recurrence in stage III is more common to happen, but doctors can reduce the probability through chemotherapy. Blood testing and CT scan years are good ways to determine whether you have a sign of cancer recurrence.

Having a healthy diet and doing exercise can reduce the risk of getting cancer. Additionally, drinking alcohol is bad for our health. To be remembered, do not consider that if you only drink a little alcohol would not affect your health. Nature has already indicated that drinking daily less than 20 grams would lead to 13.9 percent of cancer cases. Once you drink, you will have a higher risk of getting cancer than others. In addition, having excellent postoperative care is also important to patients as this can prevent cancer recurrence.

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