Problems after bowel cancer treatment – what are the key research questions?
Monday 17 November 2025
Last week, our first research roundtable event brought together researchers, clinicians and people affected by bowel cancer to discuss this critical but overlooked area.
More people than ever are living longer after treatment for bowel cancer – and that’s something to celebrate, but it also means more people are living with the effects of that treatment.
Bowel dysfunction, psychological difficulties, fatigue, financial issues… Too many people are living with life-altering consequences, often feeling like they should just be grateful their cancer was treated, or guilty for needing more help. They’re trying to adjust to a “new normal” when, really, normal should just be normal. This needs to change.
We want to make sure that research is keeping pace with what matters to patients – not just diagnosis and treatment, but life afterwards. To bring these issues to the surface, we brought together a group of passionate experts from oncologists to nurse specialists, and policy experts to patients for our roundtable event at Wellcome Collection in London.
We heard powerful talks about the different ways that cancer treatment can impact patients. We then broke into smaller groups to really explore the major unanswered questions and discuss how to make the biggest difference. These discussions were insightful, passionate and most importantly very patient focused.
In the final session, everyone came together to share what they’d learnt. The themes that emerged as the most important areas for future work are:
- Developing better ways to measure these “late effects” experienced by people after treatment
- More evidence on how treating these late effects can change patient outcomes
- Understanding the role of specialist prehabilitation clinics in reducing the impact of bowel cancer treatment
- Better education for healthcare professionals on the consequences of bowel cancer treatment
We’ll be publishing a formal consensus statement on the agreed priorities, challenges and opportunities that were identified on the day. We hope that this will help to guide future research in this area, really focusing on how we can make progress to tackle problems following bowel cancer treatment.
We thank all the attendees who took part in the roundtable. We’re also grateful to Merck for kindly sponsoring the event.
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Merck gave financial support for Bowel Cancer UK’s 'Problems Following Bowel Cancer Treatment 2025' meeting. None of our sponsors influence the content of our resources or events.
