Effect of adjuvant chemotherapy with toad venom injection in the treatment of intermediate and advanced colon cancer and its effect on cellular immunity, PTEN, and PI3k

The objective of this study is to explore the effect of adjuvant chemotherapy with toad venom injection in patients with intermediate and advanced colon cancer, in order to provide new reference drugs for clinical treatment. Prospectively, 148 patients with mid-stage to late-stage colon cancer in our hospital from January 2021 to May 2023 were selected for the study and randomly divided into two groups of 74 cases each. The control group was treated with FOLFOX4 chemotherapy, and the observation group was treated with four consecutive chemotherapy cycles based on the control group combined with toad venom injection. The treatment effects, adverse reactions, quality of life improvement rate, prognosis and cellular immune indexes [natural killer (NK) cells, CD4 + /CD8 + , CD4 + , CD3 + ], phosphatase tensin gene ( PTEN ), phosphatidylinositol-3-kinase (PI3k), and serine threonine protein kinase (pAKT) protein expression before and after treatment were counted in the two groups. The total effective rate of treatment in the observation group was 58.11% (43/74) after four cycles of chemotherapy, which was higher than that in the control group of 41.89% (31/74) ( P < 0.05). After two cycles of chemotherapy and four cycles of chemotherapy, PTEN , CD4 + /CD8 + , CD4 + , CD3 + , and NK cells in peripheral blood were higher in the observation group than in the control group, and PI3k and pAKT were lower than in the control group ( P < 0.05). There was no statistically significant difference in the rate of adverse reactions in the observation group compared with the control group ( P > 0.05); the improvement rate of quality of life in the observation group was better than that in the control group after four chemotherapy cycles of treatment ( P < 0.05); the survival rate was 75.00% (54/72) in the observation group compared with 54.29% (38/70) in the control group at 1-year follow-up. Toad venom injection adjuvant chemotherapy is effective in treating patients with intermediate and advanced colon cancer, which can upregulate PTEN level, inhibit PI3k and AKT expression, and improve immune function and quality of life of patients, thus improving prognosis.