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Study gives hope to bowel cancer sufferers

A team of British and Dutch scientists has developed an improved method of accurately identifying patients with more aggressive forms of bowel cancer. The researchers are now working on turning their findings into a prognostic test which could be used in hospitals and clinics ...

A team of British and Dutch scientists has developed an improved method of accurately identifying patients with more aggressive forms of bowel cancer. The researchers are now working on turning their findings into a prognostic test which could be used in hospitals and clinics to determine which patients need chemotherapy. The research, which was partly funded by the EU, is published in the open access journal PLoS ONE. 'Currently the hospitals use a standard test to work out how far the cancer has progressed and then they use this to determine the treatment the patient should receive,' explained Professor Chris Hutchison of Durham University in the UK. 'However, we are potentially able to more accurately predict who would benefit from chemotherapy.' In this study, the scientists analysed tissue samples from 700 bowel cancer patients and tracked their progress. They found that patients with a stem cell marker protein called Lamin A present in their tissue were more likely to have an aggressive form of bowel cancer. The researchers suggest that patients in whom the marker is detected should be given chemotherapy in addition to surgery. Bowel cancer is one of the commonest types of cancer; in 2006, around 300,000 cases of colorectal cancer were diagnosed in the EU, and around 140,000 people died of the disease. It is caused by a combination of diet, lifestyle and environmental factors. There are four stages of bowel cancer, and at the moment, a number of tests are used to determine how advanced a patient's cancer is. Patients in the earlier stages of the disease, when it has not spread to the lymph nodes, usually undergo surgery to remove the cancer from the bowel. They are rarely given chemotherapy. This is because three quarters of people with bowel cancer are aged over 65, and in these people, the harm caused by the side effects of chemotherapy could outweigh the benefits. Nevertheless, the scientists found the Lamin A marker in around one third of patients whose cancer was classified as being in the early stages of the disease. The scientists argue that these patients should be given chemotherapy to boost their chances of recovery. 'We know the best treatment for very early and very late disease but there are still a lot of unknowns in between these two extremes,' commented Professor Robert Wilson, a bowel cancer specialist at the James Cook University Hospital in Middlesbrough, UK. 'Chemotherapy can be very useful but can have a number of side effects, so we only want to use it where we think there's a good chance it will help. This test will help us determine that.' 'We now aim to carry out more work in this area to develop a prognostic tool which we hope will eventually be for widespread use by the health services in the treatment of bowel cancer,' added Dr Stefan Przyborski of Durham University.

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Netherlands, United Kingdom

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