The following is a summary of “Prognostic Impact of Mucinous Adenocarcinoma in Stage II and III Colon Cancer,” published in the November 2023 issue of Gastroenterology by Kim, et al.
Mucinous adenocarcinoma is a very uncommon type of colon cancer that shows up in the histology section. It has different cancerous symptoms than adenocarcinoma. There are, however, different opinions on how mucinous adenocarcinoma affects the prognosis of colon cancer. For a study, researchers sought to look at how mucinous adenocarcinoma affects the outlook of people with stage II and stage III colon cancer. This study was done from January 2010 to December 2015. The patients were split into two groups: those with mucinous cancer and those without it.
Propensity score matching was used to look at disease-free mortality and total survival. In total, 2,532 people with stage II or III colon cancer who had major surgery were part of the study. The average length of follow-up was 86 months. The group with mucinous adenocarcinoma had much lower disease-free survival and total survival rates than the group without mucinous cancer. When looking at subgroups, there wasn’t a big difference between patients with and without mucinous adenocarcinoma who had stage II colon cancer in terms of total life or time without disease. People with mucinous adenocarcinoma had much shorter disease-free and total mortality rates than people without this type of cancer in stage III colon cancer.
Multivariable analysis showed that having mucinous cancer was a sign of a bad outlook for both disease-free survival and total survival. Some of the problems with the study are common with historical studies that only look at one center. In stage III colon cancer, mucinous adenocarcinoma is a sign of a bad outlook, but not in stage II colon cancer. So, mucinous adenocarcinoma might not be seen as a risk factor in and of itself that needs treatment for good cancer results. But people with mucinous adenocarcinoma and stage III colon cancer need to be closely watched.
