Adjuvant chemotherapy in colon cancer: can we improve quality of care?

At the beginning of nineties, the treatment of high-risk radically resected colon cancer changed dramatically: in fact, the 1990 NIH Consensus Conference suggested an adjuvant 5-fluorouracil-based chemotherapy as the standard of care for all medically fit patients with resected stage III colon cancer. The same treatment could be considered also in patients with high-risk stage II disease; high-risk patients were defined by pathological factors such as a small number of sampled lymph nodes, T4 lesions, perforation or poorly differentiated histology [1].