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Background: Colorectal cancer is the third most commonly diagnosed malignancy in Australia. Up to a third of patients who have undergone surgery with curative intent for colorectal cancer will have a recurrence of disease leading to significant morbidity and mortality. Regional Australians have disproportionately worse outcomes. Aim: To identify factors associated with recurrence in colorectal cancer patients treated at a regional Australian hospital. Methods: This study is a retrospective cohort analysis. Consecutive patients who have undergone curative resection at a regional public and private hospital by three surgeons from a single surgical practice for either rectal cancer or colon cancer were included. Prognostic indicators of recurrence were examined via both univariate and multivariate time-toevent analyses. Results: Three hundred nine patients were included with 43 recurrences. Thirty presented with distant metastases, seven presented with locoregional recurrence and six presented with locoregional as well as distant recurrence. In univariable analysis, higher rates of recurrence were associated with tumour type, higher AJCC summary stage, higher preoperative levels of CA19-9, perineural invasion, lymphovascular invasion, <12 nodes examined, positive lymph nodes and emergency surgery status. On multivariable analysis recurrence remained associated with tumours with a mucinous and/or signet cell component, positive nodes and <12 lymph nodes examined. Conclusion: A combination of patient and treatment factors are relevant in determining the risk of recurrence for stage I–III colorectal cancer. This study emphasises the importance of histology in determining risk, particularly the number of nodes examined. CEA 19–9 may also be a useful pre-operative predictor of recurrence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Happé and Loth (2002) describe word learning as a 'privileged domain' in the development of a theory of mind. We test this claim in a series of experiments based on the Sally-Anne paradigm. Three- and 4-year-old children's ability to represent others' false beliefs was investigated in tasks that required the child either to predict the actions of a protagonist in a story or to learn the meaning of a new word used by the protagonist. Experiment 1 replicated previous findings of better performance in a false belief word-learning task compared to a false belief action-prediction task. However, systematic manipulation of the task parameters in Experiments 2 and 3 revealed that this performance discrepancy disappeared when tasks were equated in their 'referential pull' (Perner, Rendl & Garnham, 2007). We conclude that the notion of a precocious theory of mind for word learning is not required to explain dissociations in performance on false belief tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]