Venous invasion is a well-established prognostic factor in colorectal cancer and is an independent prognostic indicator of visceral metastases and decreased survival time.^1–4 Unfortunately, the use of only conventional haematoxylin and eosin staining to determine the incidence of venous invasion has yielded a wide range of results (10–90%).^1–6 In the July 2004 publication of the Journal of Clinical Pathology, Vass et al⁷ showed that using an elastica stain considerably increased the sensitivity of identifying venous invasion in colorectal cancer. Their study was carried out in a university teaching hospital by a specialist in colorectal pathology, as opposed to the original reports, which were made by a large team of non-specialists. The aim of our study was to determine whether using this technique had a similar benefit in the district general hospital setting with non-specialist reporting.

Methods

From our local database of colorectal audit forms, …