- Surgical treatment remains the major treatment for colorectal cancer.
Multimodality therapy for rectal cancer is very important. Dr. Anton Titov MD
But surgical treatment for rectal cancer is the first and foremost treatment method.
You have a lot of experience with rectal cancer surgical treatment in Sweden and elsewhere.
What are the principles of surgical treatment for colorectal cancer?
What is state of the art treatment for colorectal cancer right now?
We have to remember that there has been a very interesting historical development in
the surgery for colorectal cancer.
20 years ago treatment results, especially for rectal cancer, were significantly worse.
There was higher risk of local recurrence of rectal cancer at about 25 to 30%, and poor
survival.
But then Professor Heald introduced the Total Mesorectal Excision for rectal cancer treatment.
He started doing Total Mesorectal Excisionalready in early 1980s.
But it was not accepted until mid-90s or even late 1990s.
Total Mesorectal Excision technique is a precise surgery in the correct anatomical plane, outside
of mesorectal fascia.
You should see exactly where you're going, you should save autonomic nerves and save
mesorectal fascia.
Surgeon should take out the rectum with a complete mesorectum.
This is called Total Mesorectal Excision, TME.
It is the method of choice today, the golden standard.
Every surgeon who operates on rectal cancer has to be able to do a good Total Mesorectal
Excision.
Whether it's an open technique or laparoscopic technique - it does not matter, the specimen
[of the rectum with cancer tumor] should be perfect, with the intact fascia all the way
down to the pelvic floor.
This is extremely important.
For colon cancer, Prof. Hohenberger developed the same concept.
It is called Complete Mesocolic Excision.
Again, you follow the correct and well-defined anatomical planes outside the mesocolic fascia,
and you remove the whole mesocolon with all lymph nodes, all the way up to the superior
mesenteric artery and vein or to the aorta, if it's a left-sided tumor.
So again, good surgical practice in the correct plane to remove the whole mesorectum or the
whole mesocolon, close to the tumor - that is the gold standard.
This is something that has to be required from all colorectal cancer surgeons.
If you cannot achieve that, you should stop doing colorectal cancer surgery.
And you have to have quality control of surgery by the pathologists.
This is why the collaboration between surgeons and the pathologists is so important.
The pathologist should be a quality assessor of surgical specimen [removed tumor], they
should look at it, they should take photographs of it, and they should say: this is a good
specimen or this is a bad specimen.
If you have a bad specimen, you have to learn how to get a good specimen, or you have to
quit doing the surgery.
It's important for patients to seek the surgeon with the most experience in that particular
type of surgery.
Not necessarily the most experienced surgeon, because there is a problem that some surgeons
are very experienced, but they do the operation in the wrong way.
Experience is not everything.
Knowledge is the most important thing, being able, knowing how to do it [surgery].
Then, of course, experience helps, But if you don't know how to do surgery, it doesn't
matter how many patients you operate on.
Because if you do it wrong every time, the results of surgery will not be good.
So you have to find a well-educated surgeon and preferably with a long experience.
The knowledge of surgeon is much more important that the experience.
This is very important point.
You could do the same operation very well, but it's not the right operation for the patient.
- Exactly!
Exactly!
And also you have to tailor the operation to the patient.
For example, the Total Mesorectal Excision technique is good for most patients, but not
for all.
If you have an advanced case, the tumor may be growing into the prostate, or the urinary
bladder, or the sacrum, Total Mesorectal Excision surgery alone is not sufficient to treat such
rectal cancer patient.
It's not only that you should be able to do a TME, or CME, Complete Mesocolic Excision,
but you also have to tailor the extent of the operation to the tumor AND to the patient.
So we must not forget the patient!
TME for rectal cancer, or Complete Mesocolic Excision for colon cancer is the standard
operation for normal patient with rectal cancer or colon cancer.
But if you have a very sick patient or very old patient, maybe you could do a little less
extensive operation to keep the surgery time down, and it's not necessary to do extensive
surgical operation.
On the other hand, if you have a more extensive tumor, you may need to do more than only CME
or TME.
You may have to take out the urinary bladder, to do pelvic exenteration, or to take the
sacrum out.
If it's a colon cancer, you may have to remove the tail of the pancreas or the spleen, or
part of the abdominal wall, or the kidney...
So you have to tailor the operation according to the stage of the tumor.
Surgical strategy should be assessed, for rectal cancer - on MRI, and for colon cancer
- on a good CT scan.
This is extremely important.
So again, the collaboration with a radiologist is very important to tell the surgeons how
the tumor is growing.
Using radiology as a roadmap for planning your surgery is important.
When the surgery is done, it is important to have the pathologist assess the quality
of the surgical specimen.
Pathologist must give feedback to the surgeon whether the surgeon has done a good job.
Had the surgeon removed a tumor with good margins?
Had surgeon achieved what we call the R0 resection. [with negative tumor involvement at edges
of resection] This is extremely important for cancer surgery.
It is obvious that multidisciplinary teamsetup is extremely important [to treat cancer properly],
because the radiologist should do a good and proper preoperative evaluation with CT scan
or MRI.
The surgeon should use that evaluation ["staging"] as a roadmap for the surgery.
Because then surgeon can know what to take out or what to leave in.
And the pathologist should assess if the tumor has been completely removed, with free circumferential
margins, which implicates that the patient has a greater chance to be cured.
Of course, the radicality of the cancer surgery is crucial.
If you have an R0 resection, which means there is no tumor on the surfaces of the specimen,
then the chance of cancer cure is much higher than if there is "R1 margin" after cancer
resection, which means that there are tumor cells on the surface of the surgical specimen.
R2 margin is worst, because it means that the surgeon left the tumor inside the patient.
Then cancer prognosis is very poor.
So the quality of the surgery is extremely important for curing the patient with colorectal
cancer.
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