Chronic diarrhoea in an oncology patient - Clinical assessment and decision making

Cancer survival is improving rapidly due to advances in treatments that will often involve radiotherapy, chemotherapy and novel biological agents in addition to surgery. This comes at the price of living with chronic symptoms, of which diarrhoea is particularly common. There is good evidence that for many patients these symptoms become part of everyday life, their "normality" is adjusted and symptoms are tolerated even when limiting activities severely. Clinicians often fail to appreciate the impact of these problems, as the focus of follow up tends to be on cancer recurrence. However, the rapid identification of patients in significant trouble can lead to earlier diagnosis of treatable pathologies and improvement of patients' symptoms. The aim of this review is to highlight the mechanisms which cause oncology patients to develop diarrhoea and highlight useful investigational and treatment strategies.