Site, emergency, and duration of symptoms in the prognosis of colorectal cancer

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Abstract
Four prognostic factors, i.e., site of the tumors, mode of presentation, duration of symptoms, and pathologic staging, were correlated to the results of surgical treatment, i.e., curative resectability, postoperative complications and mortality, and five-year survival, in 161 patients operated upon for colorectal cancer. Only 31 (19 per cent) of the growths were right-sided; 71 patients (44 per cent) had symptoms less than six months. Fifty-four of them had a localized cancer; a radical procedure was performed in 114 (71 per cent), and postoperative complications occurred in 42 cases (26 per cent). The overall crude five-year survival was 38 per cent (53 of the 140 followed-up patients). The length of the clinical history did not correlate with the pathologic staging, which greatly influenced curability and survival. A statistically significant poorer prognosis was observed in patients with left-sided tumors, with an emergency presentation and with a duration of symptoms shorter than six months. A better prognosis can be achieved by means of a presymptomatic diagnosis.