Treatment for Colorectal Cancer Varies by Hospital

the Cancer Therapy Advisor take:

There is a stable variation in hospital treatment patterns for patients with metastatic colorectal cancer (CRC), according to an article published online in Cancer.

The study evaluated treatment patterns of 84,161 patients who were recently diagnosed with metastatic CRC from 1,051 hospitals using data from 2006 through 2011 in the National Cancer Data Base. 

The hospitals were evaluated on the use of different treatment procedures, such as primary site resection, metastatic site resection, chemotherapy, and palliative care.

Other evaluation factors included variation in the receipt of treatment according to the relative volume of services used by the hospitals and the variation of treatment patterns at the hospitals over the past decade.

Results showed that the overall use of volume of services varied greatly between hospitals with low volumes of service and hospitals with high volumes of service (5.0% compared to 22.3%, respectively).

A direct relationship between hospitals’ volumes of services and adjusted rates of metastatic site surgery and multiagent chemotherapy was found: as the volumes of services increased, the use of metastatic site surgery increase (6.6% to 30.8%; P<0.001) as did multiagent chemotherapy (37.8% to 57.4%; P<0.001). Similarly, the rate of palliative care also increased (8.1% to 11.3%; P=0.002).

However, the rate of use of primary site resection demonstrated little difference (56.8% vs. 59.5%; P=0.024).

The study found that hospital treatment patterns were stable over time and consistent with the data above.