The Surgeon

Regular monitoring with positron emission tomography (PET) scanning – which detects changes in the function of cells – achieves earlier detection of recurrences of colorectal cancer than conventional scanning that simply looks at the structure of body tissues, a prospective study has shown.

Colorectal cancer – cancer affecting the lower part of the digestive tract – is the second most common cause of cancer-related deaths in Western countries. Most people newly diagnosed with the disease undergo surgery to completely remove their tumour. However, approximately half of people who have curative surgery go on to develop recurrent disease. The median survival after surgery is two years. Adjuvant chemotherapy – anticancer drug treatment given just after surgery – improves the prognosis, but one-third of patients having this treatment still suffer a recurrence within two years after surgery.
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Scientists have for the first time discovered that people with the same cancer susceptibility genes respond differently depending on their race. Their results are published in Nature Genetics* .

The team from the University of Edinburgh has shown that a genetic marker is associated with an increased the risk of colon cancer in Europeans, but not in the Japanese population. But this genetic variant was associated with a similar risk of rectal cancer in both populations.

While dietary differences are already well known to be important, this discovery shows for the first time that genetic factors might explain some of the differences in bowel cancer risk between populations**.
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