Colorectal Cancer
At Reid Cancer Center, we provide comprehensive care and screenings for colorectal cancer with the latest treatments all conveniently located under one roof.
What is colorectal cancer?
Colorectal cancer is a cancer that starts in the colon or rectum. These cancers can also be named colon cancer or rectal cancer, depending on where they start. Excluding skin cancers, colorectal cancer is the third most common cancer diagnosed in both men and women in the United States.
Colorectal cancer typically begins as polyps. These small growths can develop anywhere in the large intestine, from the colon to the rectum. While colon cancer more often affects older adults, the disease can develop in younger adults. Reid Cancer Center is dedicated to preventing and treating colon cancer — the fourth most common cancer among U.S. adults.
When only the best will do
A colon cancer diagnosis can be scary, but there are many reasons for optimism. Great strides have been made in colon cancer treatment, and the disease is very treatable when detected early. At Reid Cancer Center, our team of experts is on your side, helping you understand your diagnosis and ensuring you have the medical and emotional support you need throughout treatment and beyond.
Our Richmond, Indiana-based oncology team offers a wide range of cancer treatments and clinical trials that connect you with new and experimental therapies.
Symptoms of colorectal cancer
In the early stages of colon cancer, many people don’t experience symptoms. That’s why colonoscopies and other forms of colon cancer screening are so valuable.
When symptoms appear, they can vary depending on the cancer’s stage and location. Colorectal cancer can often cause bleeding into the digestive tract, which might be visible in the stool or might not change its appearance at all. This blood loss can accumulate over time and lead to anemia, sometimes identified first through a low red blood cell count in a blood test.
Colorectal cancer symptoms might include:
- Bloody stool or bleeding from the rectum (usually bright red blood)
- Feeling as if your bowel doesn’t empty entirely
- Feeling weak and tired
- Nausea or vomiting
- Persistent changes to your bowel habits, including narrowing of your stool and diarrhea or constipation that lasts several days
- Persistent gas, cramps, and abdominal pain
- Unexplained weight loss
Many of these symptoms can be caused by conditions other than colorectal cancer, such as infection, hemorrhoids, or irritable bowel syndrome. Still, if you have any of these problems, it's important to see your doctor right away so the cause can be found and treated, if needed.
Cancer Care
Colonoscopies: Key to early detection and prevention
Colonoscopies are considered the gold standard for colon cancer screening — if colorectal cancer is detected early through screening, the five-year survival rate is about 90 percent. This vital procedure allows for early detection of cancer and enables the removal of polyps before they can develop into cancer. It's a simple process performed by skilled professionals, often with sedation to ensure your comfort. By scheduling a colonoscopy, you’re taking a proactive step toward your health and well-being.
Risk factors of colorectal cancer
Like many conditions, colon cancer has some risk factors you can’t change. These include:
- Age: Colon cancer is more common in adults older than 50.
- Family medical history: Most colon cancers occur in people without a family history of the disease. But you’re more likely to develop colon cancer if a parent, child, brother, or sister has a history of the disease.
- Genetic conditions or mutations: You can inherit certain genetic conditions that increase your risk. You might only find out if you have these conditions if you or a family member gets cancer or if you have genetic testing.
- Health history: If you have a history of colon cancer or have had polyps removed before, you are at higher risk of a recurrence. Having a history of inflammatory bowel disease can also increase your colon cancer risk.
- Race and ethnicity: Certain racial and ethnic groups have higher rates of colon cancer, including African Americans and people of Ashkenazi Jewish descent.
- Type 2 diabetes: This condition also raises your risk of colon cancer.
Fortunately, there are many colon cancer risk factors you can control. Those include:
- Excessive alcohol use and cigarette smoking: Quitting smoking and reducing alcohol consumption can protect against colon cancer and other forms of cancer.
- Sedentary lifestyle: Exercise helps prevent many cancers, including colon cancer. Aim for at least 150 to 300 minutes of moderately intense exercise or 75 to 150 minutes of vigorous-intensity exercise per week.
- Unhealthy eating habits: Diets high in red or processed meats might increase colon cancer risk. Add a variety of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains to your menus.
Colorectal cancer diagnosis
Colon cancer is most often diagnosed through a colonoscopy.
During this exam, your provider uses a scope to examine your colon and rectum for polyps. If your provider finds a suspicious polyp, they can remove it before it develops into cancer.
Staging colorectal cancer
If tests such as colonoscopy, biopsy, blood tests, or imaging studies indicate you have colorectal cancer, the next step is to determine the stage of the cancer. Imaging tests, including MRI, CT scans, PET scans, and X-rays, can all be used to determine its stage.
Colorectal cancers are usually given a stage between 0 and 4:
- Stage 0: At stage 0, cancer is found only in the innermost lining of the colon or rectum (also known as carcinoma in situ).
- Stage 1: At stage 1, cancer has spread to the next layers of the colon or rectum wall but has not reached nearby lymph nodes.
- Stage 2: By stage 2, cancer has grown into or through the wall of the colon or rectum and may have spread to nearby tissue, but not to lymph nodes.
- Stage 3: At stage 3, cancer has spread to nearby lymph nodes but it has not spread to other parts of the body.
- Stage 4: By Stage 4, cancer has spread to distant organs, such as the liver or lungs, or other distant parts of the body.
Understanding the stage of colorectal cancer helps guide treatment options and provides insight into the prognosis for managing the disease.
Colorectal cancer treatments
If you’re diagnosed with colon cancer, your oncologist will perform tests to determine whether the cancer has spread. The spread of cancerous cells determines the cancer’s stage. For example, Stage 0 colon cancer hasn’t grown past the inner layer of the colon. Colon cancer is highly treatable in this early stage. Stage 4 cancer has spread to distant organs.
Your provider will use the stage of your cancer to determine the best course of treatment. The oncologists at Reid Cancer Center use treatment options including chemotherapy, surgery, radiation therapy, and targeted therapies to treat colon cancer as effectively as possible.
Surgical treatment
For all stages of colorectal cancer, surgery is the most commonly used treatment. Polypectomies remove polyps during colonoscopies and other screening exams. If the cancer is no longer in polyp form but is still small, your provider might perform a local excision, which removes the cancerous tissue without cutting through the abdominal wall.
If the cancer is more extensive and requires more tissue to be removed, your surgeon might be unable to sew the colon back together. In those cases, you might need a resection with colostomy. In this procedure, a stoma (an opening on the outside of the body) is created for waste to pass through. The waste empties into a bag called a colostomy. Sometimes the stoma is permanent — for example, if your provider must remove the entire lower colon — but in other cases, it can be removed when the lower colon has healed sufficiently.
Chemotherapy
Chemotherapy is a medication-based cancer treatment designed to destroy cancer cells and keep them from spreading throughout the body, reducing the chance of cancer returning. Chemotherapy can be taken orally in pill form or injected into either the muscle or bloodstream where it’ll travel to and target the cancerous cells.
Radiation therapy
Radiation therapy is rarely used for colon cancer but is occasionally used for rectal cancer. In radiation therapy, X-rays or other forms of radiation target cancer cells so they no longer spread through your body. Our radiation oncologists use external radiation therapy, in which a machine outside the body directs radiation at rectal cancer. Reid Cancer Center is home to Indiana’s first TrueBeam® system, which allows your care team to target cancers more precisely and in shorter sessions.
Targeted therapy
Like chemotherapy, targeted therapy involves medications that kill cancer cells. However, targeted therapy does so in a way that preserves more healthy cells than is possible with chemotherapy and radiation. In some cases, oncologists might combine targeted therapies with chemotherapy.