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Standard treatment for stage III colon cancer consists of surgery followed by 3 months of a fluorinated pyrimidine plus oxaliplatin, with the option to extend the fluorinated pyrimidine to 6 months in patients with high-risk disease. For stage II cancer, adjuvant treatment is controversial, and current options include no such therapy, 6 months of fluorinated pyrimidine, or 3 months of fluorinated pyrimidine with oxaliplatin. Recent trials evaluating the effectiveness of administering some chemotherapy preoperatively versus all of it postoperatively have yielded mixed results.
In the latest such trial (OPTICAL), investigators in China randomized patients to 3 months of preoperative chemotherapy (with either mFOLFOX6 [fluorouracil, leucovorin,…