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The Colon Cancer Prognosis Depends Upon the Stage
A colon cancer prognosis is based mostly upon the cancer stage. You will be better prepared to fight your cancer the more you understand about colon cancer survivability and how it relates to the stage of your cancer. There are a number of different ways to prevent colon cancer, or to treat it once it becomes a problem. For example, colon cancer can be treated through colon polyp surgery, but only in certain instances where the colon cancer prognosis is still early enough that the cancer can be fully treated. The following explains the various prognosis and staging methods for colon cancer in a simple format.
Prognosis and Staging Methods
- Stage I: Duke's stage A indicates that the colon cancer has only been able to penetrate the most superficial layers of the mucosa or the bowel wall. The prognosis is still good with a five year survival rate of more than 90 %. Stage I colon cancer clearly has the best prognosis.
- Stage II: Duke's stage B indicates that the colon cancer has spread or penetrated into the bowel wall's muscular layer, reducing the prognosis to a five year survival rate of only 75 % to 80 %.
- Stage III: Duke's stage C indicates that the colon cancer has managed to spread into the nearby lymph nodes. This further reduces the survivability based on the colon cancer prognosis.
- Stage III of colon cancer indicates the involvement of lymph nodes, and the prognosis is often affected by the number of involved lymph nodes. Patients with only 1 to 3 nodes involved have a five year survival rate of approximately 45 % to 55 %, while the survival rate drops to 20 % to 30 % when 4 or more nodes are involved.
- Stage IV: Duke's stage D indicates that the colon cancer has spread or metastasized to other sites, commonly including the lung and the liver. This stage of colon cancer clearly has the worst of all prognoses, though not all stage IV cancers should be considered the same.
Survival Rate
The prognosis at this point is typically a five year survival rate of less than 5 %. But patients with 3 or less liver metastases have been found to have a survival rate of more than 20 % to 30 %.
A colon cancer prognosis depends on the location of your colon cancer, and also how far it has managed to spread. For obvious reasons, early detection is the key to treating and curing colon cancer before it manages to spread into something more severe.
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