Research updates
A book goes out of date the day it is printed. This is how I keep it current: new colorectal cancer research, read, filtered and written up in plain language.
How these are chosen
Every week I search Europe PMC, which covers PubMed and the medRxiv preprint server in one index, across the topics the book is built on: recurrence prevention and screening, diet and lifestyle, the supplements and repurposed drugs, and the microbiome.
Most of what comes back is not worth your time, so every abstract is scored for whether a patient or a clinician would actually gain anything from it, and the rest is dropped. What survives gets written up with the study design stated at the top, the numbers that matter, the limitations, and a link to the source so you can check my reading against the paper. Preprints are labelled as preprints, because they have not been peer reviewed.
I never republish an abstract. Everything here is my own synthesis, written to be readable by the person it concerns rather than by a specialist.
These summaries are education, not medical advice. A single new study rarely changes what you should do, and the ones that sound most dramatic are usually the ones that replicate least. Discuss anything here with your oncology team before acting on it.
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Aspirin reduced DFS events 39% in PIK3CA exon 9/20 tumours
A meta-analysis of three randomised trials found fewer disease-free survival events with adjuvant aspirin in colorectal tumours carrying PIK3CA exon 9 or 20 mutations. The ASCOLT trial’s own…
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Intensified preoperative treatment improved 3-year disease-free survival by 8.8 points
In a 458-patient randomised trial of high-risk locally advanced rectal cancer, a chemotherapy-intensified total neoadjuvant therapy regimen produced higher 3-year disease-free survival than conventional chemoradiotherapy. It also caused…
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84.8% two-year survival after deceased-donor transplant in 35 selected patients
In this six-centre retrospective cohort, 35 people with unresectable colorectal liver metastases received deceased-donor liver transplants. Survival after transplant was high at two years, but the study had…
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ctDNA detection linked to 10-fold and 50-fold higher recurrence risk
A plain-language summary of the α-CORRECT study reports that detectable circulating tumour DNA after surgery or during surveillance was associated with a much higher likelihood of recurrence in…
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Segmental surgery linked to 24% metachronous cancer rate in Lynch syndrome
In this institutional cohort of 450 people with Lynch syndrome and colorectal cancer, 24% of those having segmental resection later developed another colorectal cancer, compared with 5% after…
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Colonoscopy linked to 25% lower CRC hazard at ages 75–79
In a Korean retrospective cohort, adults aged 75 to 79 who had colonoscopy had a lower observed rate of newly diagnosed colorectal cancer than matched adults who did…
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Colorectal screening uptake among people with HIV pooled at 43%
This meta-analysis combined 22 studies and estimated that 43% of older adults living with HIV had undergone colorectal cancer screening. Detection rates at screening endoscopy were similar to…
Keep up with the research
New colorectal cancer research, screened and explained in plain language, sent when there is something genuinely worth reading. Roughly monthly, never more than that.
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