A comparison of colon cancer cases at the Charleston Area Medical Center with the National Cancer Data Base report.

This article reviews the pattern of care and outcome of colon cancer cases seen at Charleston Area Medical Center (CAMC) between 1985 and 1991, and compares these statistics to the most current National Cancer Data Bank (NCDB) study. CAMC's statistics paralleled those of the NCDB study in several ways including the fact that both studies indicated that there appeared to be stability in the age and gender distribution of colon cancer between 1985 and 1991, and there was a continued trend of proximal migration of colon cancers. Both the CAMC and NCDB studies also indicated that AJCC staging was used increasingly as the standard of cancer diagnosis, and that multimodal therapy (e.g., chemotherapy) was increasingly available to patients at greatest risk for recurrence after surgery (stage III patients). However, the CAMC study indicated that compared to the NCDB, there was a greater incidence of colon cancer in females, and that a greater percentage of stage III patients received adjuvant therapy in 1990 (35.9% and 70% in the NCDB and CAMC studies respectively).