• Conversion therapy in bowel cancer: Conversion therapy means giving drugs to shrink secondary tumours that cannot be operated on at first, in the hope that they become small enough to remove.
• Interval cancer: An interval cancer is one diagnosed after a screening test or a colonoscopy that found nothing, and before the next test was due.
• Liver-limited metastatic bowel cancer: Bowel cancer that has spread only to the liver, and sometimes only to the lung, is one of the few forms of secondary cancer treated with the aim of cure.
• Obstruction and T4 disease in bowel cancer: Sometimes a bowel cancer is found only when it blocks the bowel or has grown through its outer wall into the peritoneum or a neighbouring organ.
• Anti-EGFR rechallenge: When an EGFR antibody stops working, the resistant cells that caused it fade away once the drug is withdrawn.
• Adenoma detection rate: The adenoma detection rate is the share of screening colonoscopies in which an endoscopist finds at least one adenoma.
• Palliation in colorectal cancer: obstruction, stents, stomas and liver capsule pain: What is done when a bowel cancer blocks the bowel, when the liver is studded with deposits and hurts, or when a tumour in the rectum bleeds and will not stop.
• Faecal occult blood test (guaiac): The guaiac faecal occult blood test was the first stool test used for bowel screening: six smears from three separate stools, read by a colour change when blood is present.
• R-spondin fusion: R-spondin fusions are rearrangements that make a bowel tumour overproduce a protein which turns the Wnt growth pathway up from outside the cell.
• Circumferential resection margin (rectal cancer): The circumferential resection margin is the side surface of the removed rectum, the plane the surgeon cut along.

Biomarker results to ask for: Mismatch repair and microsatellite instability, RAS and BRAF V600E mutation, HER2 amplification (metastatic), Primary tumour side, Circulating tumour DNA after surgery, Carcinoembryonic antigen.

Bring copies of scan reports, pathology and blood results, and a list of every medicine and supplement.

• Stage I to III: Colectomy with regional lymphadenectomy; adjuvant FOLFOX or CAPOX for stage III and high-risk stage II, with ctDNA guidance under study. (FOLFOX (5-FU, leucovorin, oxaliplatin), CAPOX (capecitabine, oxaliplatin), DYNAMIC, CIRCULATE-US, CHALLENGE (CCTG CO.21))
• Mismatch-repair deficient, localised: Neoadjuvant nivolumab and ipilimumab (NICHE-2) and adjuvant atezolizumab with FOLFOX (ATOMIC) in trials. (NICHE-2, ATOMIC (Alliance A021502), Nivolumab, Ipilimumab)
• Metastatic: As the colorectal page by sidedness and RAS, BRAF and HER2 status. (Colorectal cancer, Cetuximab, Panitumumab, Bevacizumab, PARADIGM)

From the standard of care recorded for this cancer; which apply depends on your stage and biomarkers. Ask which the team recommends and why.