Adjuvant chemotherapy for stage II colon cancer: Whom to treat?

The treatment of choice in stage II colon cancer is surgery, which alone has shown a high cure rate (about 80%). The role of adjuvant chemotherapy is still a matter of debate. This clinical issue leads to the need for identifying patients who may benefit from postoperative chemotherapy based on their risk of recurrence. Patients with stage II colon cancer need to be stratified according to risk factors, which can be either clinical or pathological. In this review article, we analyzed various risk factors individually and try to quantify the relative contribution of each factor. We also analyzed various chemotherapy regimens and their duration as well.