[Adjuvant treatment in surgery of colon and rectal cancer]

Up to now, there has been no real evidence about the effectiveness of adjuvant surgical treatments in colo-rectal cancer in patients with no evidence of disease. Investigations are frequently out of the rules that must be followed to accept the effectiveness of some treatment. Results with radiotherapy as a loco-regional treatment and chemotherapy or immunotherapy as systemic treatments are contradictory. Our opinion is that, at least in patients with Dukes'C stage, efforts must persist to find the best adjuvant scheme to prolong the free-disease interval, or ideally, increasing the number of patients healed by surgery.