Long-term outcomes of colorectal cancer surgery for elderly patients: a propensity score-matched analysis

To investigate the effect of old age on the perioperative, short-term, and long-term surgical outcomes of elderly patients undergoing curative surgery for colorectal cancer (CRC).

The subjects of this retrospective study were 526 patients who underwent curative resections for stage I-III CRC between March 2005 and March 2016. We divided the patients into a young group (< 75 years old, n = 361) and an elderly group (≥ 75 years old, n = 165) and compared the clinicopathological factors and prognoses of the two groups. We performed a propensity score-matched (PSM) analysis with inverse probability of treatment weighting (IPTW) to avoid confounding bias.

The elderly group had more right-sided tumors and more comorbidities than the young group. After PSM, there were 148 patients in each group. Although the elderly group had significantly shorter overall survival than the young group, the two groups did not differ significantly in cancer-specific survival (CSS; P = 0.136) or recurrence rate (RR; P = 0.317). Multivariate analysis with IPTW also revealed no significant difference in CSS (P = 0.171) or RR (P = 0.284) between the young and elderly groups. Our findings were limited by the study's retrospective single-institute conditions, and the inclusion of only patients who underwent radical resections.

Primary tumor resection is appropriate for elderly patients with CRC.