Survival in Laparoscopic Surgery for Colon and Rectal Cancer

Introduction: Colonic laparoscopic surgery has been performed since the early nineties of the past century. Despite its advantages: less postoperative pain, faster intestinal and respiratory functions recovery among others, its acceptance has not been the same as with other laparoscopic procedures. In oncologic surgery particularly, the main cause of non-acceptance has been the fear of not respecting oncologic criteria and reports on port-site metastases in the abdominal wall. Objective: To determine patient survival after laparoscopic colorectal resections. Material and Method: A descriptive, retrospective and longitudinal study was carried out at the National Center for Minimally Invasive Surgery from January 2005 to December 2015. The studied variables were age, gender, the reason for surgery, surgical technique, mortality, overall survival. Results: When comparing survival curves according to tumor location, it was found that those patients with rectal tumors who underwent surgery had a significantly lower survival during complete follow-up than patients with tumors in the rest of the colon (p=0.032). Significant differences were also found in survival curves regarding the stage disease; stage IV patients showed the worst survival during the follow-up of this series. Conclusions: Survival in our study, with the limitations given by retrospective analysis, in patients who had surgery for colorectal cancer with minimally invasive techniques at five and ten years was 70.9% and 66.8% respectively, an appropriate rate and similar to that described in the scientific medical literature.