With Tumors Cut Out, Liver Can Re-Grow Cancer-Free

Main Category: Colorectal Cancer
Also Included In: Cancer / Oncology
Article Date: 01 Sep 2007 - 1:00 PDT

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Every two minutes, about six people find out they have colorectal cancer.* It's the third most common type of cancer in both men and women.* For many, that diagnosis is only the beginning - half of the cases also spread to the liver. If that happens there was little doctors could do - until now. Now an aggressive new approach is giving patients new hope.

Years of working with horses has taught Ethel Shumway to be very persistent. It came in handy when her doctors broke the news that her colorectal cancer had spread to her liver.

"I wasn't given much hope. I was willing to try. You are at the point you have to try something. I said, let's do it," says Shumway.

What Ethel wanted to do was undergo chemotherapy to try and shrink the cancer that had metastasized, or spread, to her liver. The tumor took up 75% of her liver and that's why some doctors had told her she was out of options.

But doctors at Ohio State University's James Cancer Hospital disagreed.

"We want to break away from the traditional thinking that metastatic colon cancer is a death sentence. For a lot of patients, it's not," says Tanios Saab, MD, at Ohio State's James Cancer Hospital.

Doctors at The James say if chemotherapy or radiation can shrink the tumor, surgeons can go in and get the rest. The liver is the only solid organ that can grow back once it's cut. Surgeons have found that they can take out as much as 80% of it, and within a year a healthy liver will grow right back.

"Now a year after their curative operation and two years after they've been told to go to hospice, they're still looking good, feeling good, have good quality of life and are free of cancer as far as we can tell," says Mark Bloomston, MD, at Ohio State's James Cancer Hospital.

That's what happened with Ethel. Thanks to this aggressive approach, she went from having a future that was uncertain, to one that is wide open.

Just a few years ago, aggressive operations like this weren't an option. Doctors would not operate on a liver tumor that was bigger than five centimeters. This new approach could save thousands of lives because the liver is the number one place that colorectal cancer spreads.**

* U.S. National Institutes of Health, http://www.cancer.gov

** Clinical Cancer Research, Vol. 8, 144-148, January 2002, http://www.clincancerres.aacrjournals.org

Ohio State University