Influence of age and site of disease on lymph node yield in colorectal cancer
Omid Ahmadi, Mark D Stringer, Michael A Black, John L McCall
For adequate staging of colorectal cancer and its treatment, it is recommended by multiple international guidelines that at least 12 lymph nodes are harvested during surgery and examined. However, this study shows that lymph node retrieval and examination is influenced by a number of variables. The most important factors are patient age (with younger patients having a higher number of lymph nodes), location of tumour (tumours in the right side of the colon have higher lymph nodes) and size of the tumour (the bigger the tumour the higher the number of lymph nodes).
