Colon cancer is the second-leading cause of cancer death in the United States and the third most common cancer in Canada behind breast and lung cancer in women and prostate and lung cancer in men. But a review of data from 1,296 U.S. hospitals showed a worrying truth: only 38 percent of them checked at least 12 lymph nodes in at least three quarters of patients who had undergone surgery to remove colon cancer in 2004 and 2005, Reuters notes.

“We were disappointed at how low the compliance rate is still,” Dr. Karl Bilimoria of Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, who led the study, was quoted as saying by the same source.

Checking more lymph nodes improves the rate of survival from colon cancer because it helps doctors to accurately diagnose the stage of the disease and to find the most effective treatment.

“Every surgeon has a story about a colon cancer patient where the pathology report showed only a few lymph nodes and no cancer was found,” Billimoria said.

Billimoria and his team analyzed data from 74,669 colon cancer patients who underwent colectomy in those hospitals in 1996-1997 and 82,120 in 2004-2005.

Cancer of the colon and rectum (also called colorectal cancer) includes cancerous growths in the colon, rectum and appendix. The spread of colon cancer to distant organs is called metastasis of the colon cancer. The disease causes 655,000 deaths worldwide per year. It is common in the Western world and is rare in Asia and Africa.