Looking At Stage 1 Colon Cnacer
Colon cancer, (well, all cancers in fact) are staged. The stage of a cancer refers to how advanced it is, (i.e. what stage it is at). When a doctor tells a patient what stage it is at, he or she will give a diagnosis based on stages. Stage 0 being the least advanced and stage 4 being the most advanced. Usually stage 4 will mean that the cancer has spread to many other parts of the body. The staging of colon cancer is more complicated than this as there are sub-divisions and different methods of staging but for the sake of being user-friendly we will keep to a basic form of these stages. In this article we will be looking at stage 1 colon cancer, it's definition, and what it means to the patient.
Stage 1 colon cancer is the diagnosis that is given when the cancer is least advanced and easiest to treat. Frequently with stage 1 colon cancer the patient may just need an operation to remove the affected area and will not have to have any follow up treatment like chemotherapy or radiation therapy. In most cases, it is not possible to determine the stage of colon cancer until after an operation has been performed. The wall of the colon or rectum is layered and cancer can spread to each of these layers as well as other organs nearby. In advanced stages, colon cancer can also spread to organs in the body that are much further away.
When a patient has an operation, the surgeon will remove some of the affected tissue and pass it on to a pathologist, where it will be examined. This information will be then be used to define the stage of the cancer. As mentioned above, it is more complicated than this. As well as sub-divisions there are different methods of staging and different groupings. In stage 1 colon cancer, this will mean that the tumour has not yet grown beyond the innermost wall of the colon. It also means that no lymph nodes have been affected.
For a patient, this is obviously the best outcome to hear after an operation. Chances of survival are much higher. Treatment of stage 1 colon cancer is also shorter and less invasive. In nearly all cases of this description the patients operation will involve finding the affected section of colon, cutting this away, and then joining the two healthy sections back together. This type of surgery is known as 'resection'. In stage 1 colon cancer, it is not usually necessary to give the patient any further treatment. Because the chances of the cancer returning are very small, chemotherapy, or radiation treatment can be avoided.
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