Overview of Colorectal Cancer Treatment Landscape
More Programs and Publications Featuring Dr. Fola May
In this program:
Colorectal cancer treatments have had some recent advancements. Dr. Fola May from UCLA Health shares an overview of the primary treatment methods in use and care team members colorectal cancer patients may meet with for treatment.
Transcript
Broderick Rodell:
Sometimes the obstacles that a patient may face limit their access to treatment, can you give us an overview of the treatment landscape for colorectal cancer, and along with that, what are some of the modalities being used?
Dr. Fola May:
Absolutely, and we have a lot of advance...we have a lot of advancements in treatment for colorectal cancer. So for those individuals who, unfortunately, develop a colorectal cancer, and that's upwards of 150,000 Americans a year who are diagnosed with this disease. The good news is that we have a lot of good technology and innovation with treatment, there are three types of treatment that we consider, and the type of treatment that you get depends on the stage of your disease and the location of your disease. So whether it's in the colon or the rectum, what part of the colon it is and how much it has spread beyond the colon, the three types of treatment are surgery, so there are some patients that are fortunate enough that we can just do a surgical procedure, we can cut out part of the colon, many times, we don't even need to cut out the entire colon and they will go on to live a healthy life, and individuals who've had spread beyond the wall of the colon, however, we often will need to do chemotherapy, which are intravenous or medications that you take in a pill or IV, that help treat the cancer that has spread into the lymph nodes and to the blood system, and then there's a small group of people who are eligible for radiation, and that's typically for the rectal cancer subgroup, these individuals, we can do radiation, which is just an external treatment to the area that the tumor is growing to help regress the tumor cells, so depending on where your cancer is, how progressed, and you'll meet with doctors, who'll meet with surgeons, you'll meet with oncologists and radiation oncologists, and they will come up with a plan to decide if you need all three of those treatments or just one of them.
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