Systemic chemotherapy in colorectal cancer

Colorectal cancer is the third most common type of cancer in the world. Relapse and death due to relapse develop in approximately half of the patients after curative resection in colon cancer. Adjuvant therapy is recommended to reduce relapses. Adjuvant treatment has yielded significant survival advantage in colon cancer. On the other hand, surgical resection rates were increased with neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy in rectal cancer. The combination of 5-fluorouracil + oxaliplatin has become the standard treatment for stage III patients with colon cancer. In stage II patients, adjuvant therapy is recommended only for patients with a high risk of relapse (e.g., lymphovascular invasion, etc.), and 5-fluorouracil-based therapy is the standard treatment. Also, FOLFOX and FOLFIRI have standard primary chemotherapy options for metastatic colorectal cancer treatment. Addition of biological agents to FOLFOX or FOLFIRI chemotherapy increased survival over 2 years. In this section, all systemic therapies in colorectal cancer are examined. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021. All rights reserved.