Colorectal cancer is the third most common cancer in men and women. Where
patients go first for colorectal cancer treatment can make a difference. Fox
Chase, like any major academic center and certainly, you know, in this area, we
are a leader in terms of the expertise and the depth we offer of care within GI.
I think it's important to go to a place which has the specialization in the
disease that you have.
We have an amazing GI oncology program here.
We certainly have an area of experience and day to day exposure that provides a specialization
that most places can't provide.
Fox Chase is a center that participates
really in writing the national guidelines, so I think that as a patient
you have to realize that there's a great value to that.
If you just do one thing all the time,
you do it well. When you have something as important as a
cancer diagnosis, you want to go to somebody who - this is what they do.
With colorectal cancer, the majority of patients will receive a combination of
treatments, including radiation therapy, chemotherapy or systemic therapies, and
surgery. The types of treatments you receive will depend on the cancer stage
and other factors of your specific diagnosis.
We treat patients with all kinds of radiation, so 3-D conformal radiation, which was, in many ways
pioneered and developed here. IMRT which, again, was brought to Fox Chase as the
first place in the region to get that technology.
One of the other options that
may be presented is systemic therapies. These can include chemotherapy, targeted
therapy, and immunotherapy. They can be given at different times during
treatment for colorectal cancer.
I think it's really important not only to be
talking to patients about how to treat their cancer and what their prognosis is
going to be, but what's important to them, and then, based on that, we can try and
tailor our chemotherapy regimen to their other responsibilities because cancer
should be a part of your life, but it shouldn't be the only thing that you're thinking about.
We offer treatments from standard chemotherapies
to more targeted therapies, which are based on the tumor markers we
have, or the genomic information that we have from your tumor.
We have a very diverse clinical trials portfolio that basically provides us access to new
drugs for colon cancer. We have investigators who are actively
interested and investigating these diseases.
In my little neck of the GI world,
in these colon cancers that are related to hereditary syndromes, these
agents have been very very effective in a way that is exciting beyond belief.
Sometimes your medical team might recommend surgery as the best treatment
option for your colon cancer.
So, many times we see patients who don't have as
many other options at other hospitals, or may have been told that maybe surgery
could not be done. And we have an expertise treating patients in our
technical acumen to go and accomplish things that other surgeons potentially
can't do.
Specifically for colorectal cancer patients we do laparoscopic
surgery, robotic surgery, and most up front surgery. If the patient has not
had a lot of extensive surgery before, we're able to accomplish
the operation using these smaller incisions.
The benefit of what we're
doing with minimally invasive surgery: the simple answer is smaller incisions.
Cosmetically, it looks better. The other benefits are things like there's less of
an immune response, so from a medical standpoint, you do better as well.
The visualization that you get from the robot is tremendous. I mean, we can do
these really advanced rectal surgeries using the da Vinci robot because we get
really deep in the pelvis. We really kind of can see all the tumor get the whole
thing out. For the patient's benefit, it helps them because they have
smaller incisions.
You have a more rapid recovery time and if there's
additional treatment needed - if you're going to be looking at adjuvant or
additional chemotherapy, or radiation therapy to prevent the cancer from
coming back, you can embark on that treatment more rapidly.
The cool thing about our program is that it's very multidisciplinary, so
we have a weekly tumor board where the medical, surgical, and radiation
oncologists meet and discuss cases with pathology and radiology being there.
When you have that kind of relationship I think it means that the patients are the
winners because they are getting the best possible treatment management plan
with all of the options considered.
Fox Chase Cancer Center also offers
colorectal cancer screening to find any issues before they progress.
In addition, we offer colorectal cancer prevention
in the form of comprehensive risk assessment and genetic testing.
Risk assessment is a branch of oncology that
is really focused on the risk factors or understanding the hereditary nature
of cancer. It helps people understand whether there are risks in the
family that we can actually do something about.
Some of our cancers in GI are associated with
a familial risk or a genetic cause. When we're thinking about
a particular patient, we're taking into account, not only their disease, but their
family history, the age at which they were diagnosed, what type of cancer they had.
I only see a few different types of cancer, which means that I see a lot of those few different types of cancer so,
things that are relatively uncommon that a community physician might see once a
year, or a couple times a year, I am seeing every week.
There is a certain focus on
what we do, a mission to do something related to cancer and it makes it a more
integrated place in that the people who work here all have their eye on the same
prize, and I think that, for many patients, makes it the best place to go.
To learn more about Fox Chase's multidisciplinary treatment services,
contact us today at 888-FOX-CHASE, or visit FoxChase.org.