Treatments for stage 4 anal cancer
There is no standard treatment for stage 4 anal cancer. Your healthcare team will suggest treatments based on your needs and work with you to develop a treatment plan. The goal of treatment is to control the disease, relieve symptoms (called palliative therapy) and help you live as long as possible with a good quality of life.
Your treatment plan may include one or more of the following treatments.
Chemotherapy
Chemotherapy uses drugs to destroy cancer cells. You may be offered chemotherapy for stage 4 anal cancer. It may be given alone or as part of chemoradiation.
The chemotherapy drug combinations most often used to treat stage 4 anal cancer are carboplatin and paclitaxel or fluorouracil (also called 5-fluorouracil or 5-FU) and cisplatin. Treatment usually continues as long as the cancer does not grow or spread any further and you can cope with the side effects.
Find out more about chemotherapy for anal cancer.
Surgery
You may be offered surgery for stage 4 anal cancer if the tumour causes symptoms like pain and bleeding. A wide local excision removes the tumour and a small amount of healthy tissue around it (called the surgical margin).
Find out more about surgery for anal cancer.
Clinical trials
Talk to your doctor about clinical trials open to people with anal cancer in Canada. Clinical trials look at new ways to prevent, find and treat cancer. Find out more about clinical trials.
If you can't have or don't want cancer treatment
You may want to consider a type of care to make you feel better without treating the cancer itself. This may be because the cancer treatments don't work anymore, they're not likely to improve your condition or they may cause side effects that are hard to cope with. There may be other reasons why you can't have or don't want cancer treatment.
Talk to your healthcare team. They can help you choose care and treatment for advanced cancer.