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5 slides generated from the cancer page, with a quiz from the open benchmark and speaker notes that cite the sources. Arrow keys move between slides; Print gives one slide per page.
Mucinous adenocarcinoma is a form of bowel cancer, about one in ten cases, in which more than half the tumour is made of mucus produced by the cancer cells. It favours the right side of the colon, is often mismatch-repair deficient, tends to be found at a later stage and does somewhat worse than ordinary bowel cancer, but it is treated the same way.
The WHO classification defines mucinous adenocarcinoma by extracellular mucin making up more than 50 percent of the tumour, and grades it by its mismatch repair status rather than by gland formation (Nagtegaal 2020). In the Munich registry of 28,056 patients, mucinous adenocarcinoma made up 9.7 percent of colorectal cancers and was located in the proximal colon in 57 percent of cases against 34 percent of ordinary adenocarcinoma, was diagnosed at more advanced stages and had reduced survival (J Cancer Res Clin Oncol 2016). In 9,494 SEER patients with mucinous against 107,735 with non-mucinous adenocarcinoma, mucinous tumours occurred in older patients and were larger and more often of moderate grade, and surgery improved survival (Annals of Translational Medicine 2020). The meta-analysis of 1,087,055 patients found mucinous carcinoma more often right-sided than adenocarcinoma and with reduced five-year overall survival (Discover Oncology 2021).
How it differs from its parent: site, stage at diagnosis, frequent mismatch repair deficiency and a weaker response to some chemotherapy in older series; management nonetheless follows the colorectal page by stage and molecular status, with mismatch repair status deciding immunotherapy.
| Setting | Approach | Guideline |
|---|---|---|
| All stages | Treated as the colorectal page by stage and mismatch repair status. | not mapped |