CHICAGO – More than a decade after new treatment guidelines for the disease were issued, many patients with advanced colon cancer are not getting chemotherapy after surgery, despite clear evidence it boosts survival, a study found.
Blacks, women and elderly patients were found to be less likely to get chemo, even though such treatment was shown to improve survival in all groups.
About two-thirds of the patients who received chemotherapy in addition to surgery were alive after five years, compared with about half of those who had surgery alone, according to the study in today’s Journal of the American Medical Association.
On average, chemotherapy improved the five-year survival rate by about 16 percent.
The National Institutes of Health published guidelines in 1990 recommending chemotherapy after surgery for stage-three colon cancer, in which the cancer has spread to the lymph nodes of the abdomen.
The researchers analyzed data from nearly 86,000 patients, and found that the share of those who received surgery plus chemo went from 39 percent in 1991 to 64 percent in 2002.
The disparity found in the JAMA study narrowed for blacks over the decade, until it was no longer significant in 2002. But the gap remained wide for women and even wider for elderly patients.
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