Nutritional Support in Patients with Colorectal Cancer: State of Knowledge and Perspectives

Abstract

Many cancer patients have a nutritional risk. Nutritional support therapy plays an important role in cancer treatment, especially for the patients with digestive system cancer. Nutritional support therapy for tumor patients should be based on the specific saturations. For example, types of tumors, degree of differentiation, and nutritional status of the patients need to be evaluated in detail, and then propose the specific implementation approach. For the colorectal cancer patients with promising treatment prospects, nutritional support should be standardized and make every effort to improve the safety and effectiveness of treatment. This article reviews the research progress on nutritional support therapy for colorectal cancer patients thereby promoting the standardized development of nutritional support therapy and better guiding the clinical nutritional support practice. In addition, this paper discussed the feasibility of a combination of nutritional and exercise interventions to efficiently improve muscle and strength, physical function, nutritional status, fatigue, and quality of life in colorectal cancer patients. Establishing a standard process for nutritional support should become an interdisciplinary task. Standard procedures and quality control should also be specified to ensure the effectiveness of nutritional therapy. The current knowledge, and perspectives of application of nutritional support in patients with colorectal cancer in this paper could provide a good reference for the future research of cancer diagnosis and treatment.