Mayo Clinic Health Manager
Get free personalized health guidance for you and your family.
Get Started
About our e-newsletters
- Free e-newsletters
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- We do not share your e-mail address
Housecall, our weekly general-interest e-newsletter, keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics with timely, reliable, practical information, recipes, blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts and more. Our biweekly topic-specific e-newsletters also include blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts, and other useful information that will help you manage your health.
Housecall Archives
Mayo Clinic Housecall
Stay up to date on the latest health information.
What you get
- Free weekly e-newsletter
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- Recipes, tools and other helpful information
- We do not share your e-mail address
Why it's done
By Mayo Clinic staff
Colectomy is used to treat and prevent diseases and conditions that affect the colon, such as:
- Bowel obstruction. A blocked colon is an emergency that may require total or partial colectomy, depending on the situation.
- Bowel perforation. A torn colon is also an emergency that may require colectomy.
- Colon cancer. Early-stage cancers may require only a small section of the colon to be removed during colectomy. Cancers at a later stage may require more of the colon to be removed.
- Crohn's disease. If medications aren't helping you, removing the affected part of your colon may offer temporary relief from signs and symptoms.
- Ulcerative colitis. Your doctor may recommend total colectomy if medications aren't helping to control your signs and symptoms.
- Preventive surgery. If you have a very high risk of colon cancer due to the formation of multiple precancerous colon polyps, you may choose to undergo total colectomy to prevent cancer in the future. Colectomy may be an option for people with inherited genetic conditions that increase colon cancer risk, such as familial adenomatous polyposis or Lynch syndrome.
Discuss your treatment options with your doctor. In some situations, you may have a choice between various types of colectomy operations. Your doctor can discuss the benefits and risks of each.
