Searching for cancer in lots of lymph nodes after colon cancer surgery does not seem to increase patients’ chances of survival, a new study finds. Researchers from the U.S. National Cancer Institute analyzed data on more than 86,000 cancer patients from the Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) cancer registry. The investigators found that over the past 20 years, there’s been a trend toward pathologists evaluating more and more lymph nodes in the hunt for cancer cells that have spread beyond the colon, according to the study in the Sept. 14 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
