Agger EA, et al. - Researchers undertook this retrospective population-based analysis to determine the influence of circumferential resection margin (CRM) distance on the local recurrence (LR) risk in rectal cancer. They utilized data from the Swedish Colorectal Cancer Registry. This study involved 8,392 patients who underwent rectal cancer resection between 2005 and 2013. Overall 739 and 7,653 patients had a CRM of 1·0 mm or less and a CRM larger than 1·0 mm, respectively. The participants were observed over a mean duration of 51 months. In the group with a CRM of 1·0 mm or less and in patients with a CRM larger than 1·0 mm, experts detected 66 LRs (8·9%) and 256 LRs (3·3%), respectively. For CRM of 0, 0·1–1·0, 1·1–1·9 and at least 2·0 mm, an LR rate of 17·0% (27 of 159), 6·7% (39 of 580), 1·9% (2 of 103) and 3·4% (254 of 7550) was estimated, respectively. Findings revealed that LR risk was associated with exact CRM and patients with a CRM of 0 mm exhibited the highest risk. Early identification of LR may be enabled by close monitoring of patients with no measurable clear margin.