Like every other type of cancer, colon cancer can also recur. This is the main reason way, constant checks must be done after the initial treatment has been made and cancer has been cured. This is even more important when you already have developed cancer once, because the chances of getting it again are increasingly high. Like in the initial tumor case, detecting the disease very early is the most important element in colon cancer cure. When the cancer recurrence, regardless of its type is discovered early, the chances of cure are the highest. When the colon cancer recurrence, which occurs after a period of time, is developed it can be cured through a surgical intervention. However, you must know that in general, colon cancer recurrence rates are high.

A study published in the British Journal of Surgery showed that about 23 percent of all the patients that have been diagnosed with colon cancer and at whom colon cancer was treated have also developed recurrences in the five years time period.  Other researches have shown that colon cancer recurrence rates can vary from 4 percent to 55 percent. These rates can be different depending on the dimension of the initial tumor. So, 11 percent of those who had an original tumor smaller than 3 centimeters and 28% al all those whom original tumor was larger than 3 cm, according to this statistic will develop a colon cancer recurrence.

Besides the tumor dimension, the stage of disease is another element that may indicate the potential of a colon cancer recurrence. For colon cancer stage one, 10 percent of the cancer patients developed a recurrence. In stage two the recurrence rates grow, and almost 24 percent of all those diagnosed have to pass to a new cancer phase. For stage three colon cancer recurrence rates are at about 41 percent.

The same study showed that the doctors’ experience in colon cancer surgery is also an important factor in the disease recurrence. This statistics results pointed the fact that when the medical team that performs a surgery for colon cancer has a great experience, the chances in developing recurrences are lower than in the case in which the medical team attended less than ten this kind of medical interventions. This fact can be explained through the hypothesis in which colon cancer in a disease that can be cured in the first stages very easy only when the right treatment applied. The right treatment for colon cancer in those stages is surgery. So, when the surgery is not made properly, besides the fact that cancer can grow and the patients’ health be affected, a bad surgery can also mean a cancer recurrence even a year later after the intervention.