(HealthCentersOnline) - Colon cancer patients who undergo more extensive lymph node analysis may have a better chance of surviving the disease. These findings are the result of a large research study published in the October 2006 issue of the Annals of Surgery.
Colorectal cancer is the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths in the United States. In 2006, there will be more than 106,000 new cases of colon cancer and nearly 42,000 cases of rectal cancer.
In cancer patients, lymph nodes are commonly dissected to determine if the cancer has spread. A sampling of lymph nodes are removed during the procedure and the tissue is analyzed by a pathologist.
In the recent study, researchers examined clinical information from colon cancer patients in The Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) database. The patients were diagnosed with colon cancer between the years of 1988 and 2000.
Patients with colon cancer that had spread distantly in the body were excluded from the study. Also, only patients with a known number of sampled lymph nodes were included in the analysis. In total, data from nearly 83,000 colon cancer patients was examined.
The patients were divided into groups according to the number of lymph nodes that were removed: zero, 1 to 7, 8 to 14, and 15 or more. The median number of sampled lymph nodes among the patients was nine.
For all stages of cancer, survival improved with an increased number of sampled lymph nodes. Those patients who had 15 or more lymph nodes analyzed demonstrated a 20 percent lower death rate than those who had only 1 to 7 lymph nodes dissected.
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Based on the results, researchers suggest that physicians remove at least 15 lymph nodes in colon cancer patients. They also note that most current lymphadenectomy procedures do not meet these guidelines and additional studies should further investigate this practice.
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