THE VARYING DEGREES OF ANEMIA PRODUCED BY CARCINOMA IN DIFFERENT PARTS OF THE COLON

Abstract

In 1913 and 1921 W. J. Mayo¹ called attention to the fact that carcinoma of the proximal half of the colon has a greater tendency to the production of anemia than carcinoma of any other part of the body, with the exception of the median portion of the stomach. As this observation gives rise to a number of interesting questions, many of them of considerable clinical importance, it seemed worth while to follow it up with a statistical analysis to see, first, how definite the peculiarity is, and, second, what explanation can be found for it. For the purposes of this study, we have gone over the records of most of the cases of cancer of the colon in which operation was performed at the Mayo Clinic during the last twenty years, and have divided these cases into a number of groups according to the situation of the tumor,