Ricerc@Sapienza

Crohn's disease-associated small bowel carcinoma is a rare event, usually reported to have a severe prognosis. However, in previous investigations we have found a minority of cases displaying a relatively favorable behavior, thus outlining the need to improve the histopathologic prediction of Crohn's disease-associated small bowel carcinoma prognosis.

Purpose: Stage II colon cancer (CC) represents a challenging scenario for the choice of adjuvant chemotherapy; here, histologic factors need to be weighed up to establish the risk of recurrence. Tumor budding (TB) has recently been indicated as a confident predictor of clinical outcome in CC. Likewise, the presence of poorly differentiated clusters (PDCs) in a tumor has been pointed out as a leading criterion of a tumor grading system. Our aim was to evaluate in patients with stage II CC the relationship between these features and clinical outcome.