Rectal cancer

Cancer is, without a doubt, a dangerous, cruel, treacherous and deadly disease. Cancer can develop almost everywhere, no one is immune from its appearance. Annually tens and hundreds of thousands of people of different ages die from cancer. Rectal cancer is the third most common form of cancer in the United Kingdom. Every year oncologists tolerate more than 37 thousand diagnoses of "rectal cancer". And although in diagnostics in Britain it works efficiently and operatively, only a minority of oncological diseases are detected. Alas, most of them remain undetected.

Symptoms of rectal cancer have been described in the medical literature for a very long time. The main such symptoms include rectal bleeding, which appears regardless of the stage of the disease and affects more than 50 percent of patients, diarrhea and constipation - all that is known under the collective term "changes in the rhythm of defecation", as well as weight loss, abdominal pain And anemia. The so-called tenesms, or false urges for defecation, which can happen quite often and are accompanied by small discharge of mucus, pus or blood (this symptom is characteristic for a rather late stage of the disease), but which do not bring the slightest relief, are especially hard to bear. In addition, the patient begins to observe and symptoms of rectal cancer, like rumbling and bloating after the escape of gases and stool, and these symptoms tend to become permanent. However, such symptoms are common to many malignant diseases, so doctors-diagnosticians have a hard time. Moreover, it can be stated with confidence that there is no test that could with sufficient reliability indicate the cause of the disease, even if the methods of examining the patient include a variety of tests (including the evaluation of hemoglobin and the detection of latent blood in excrement) .

Thus, the fear of "missing" cancer of the rectum is almost the main driving motive that guides people seeking help from diagnosticians. Symptoms associated with the rectum are often an indication for a colonoscopy, which with some degree of probability will help determine whether there is cancer of the colon and rectum, or precancerous condition.

Cancer of the rectum begins as a malignant adenomatous polyp, which develops into an adenoma with a high degree of dysplasia, which in turn progresses to invasive cancer. The growth of the tumor over time leads to the fact that there is an intestinal obstruction, both complete and partial. Neoplasms of this type that affect the wall of the intestine (stages 1 and 2 according to the classification system of malignant tumors) can still be cured, but without treatment they can spread to regional lymph nodes (stage 3) or further (stage 4). Surgical treatment of colorectal cancer is possible at stages 1 and 2 of the tumor, and up to 73% of tumors of stage 3 can be cured by combined use of surgery and chemotherapy. Alas, the 4th stage is still incurable.

How the cancer of the rectum will develop, many different factors influence. The task facing the doctors is to identify the molecular preconditions of the individual for the occurrence of cancer, its development and reaction to antitumor treatment.