BackgroundAlthoughschistosomiasishas been basically eliminated, it has not been completely extinction in China and occasional outbreaks occur in Europe in recent years. The relationship between inflammation caused bySchistosomajaponicum and colorectal cancer (CRC) is still obscure, and the inflammation based prognostic systems of schistosomal colorectal (SCRC) has rarely been reported.AimTo explore the different roles of tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) and C-reactive protein (CRP) in SCRC and in Non-schistosomal CRC (NSCRC), providing a possible predictive system to evaluate outcomes and to improve the risk stratification for CRC patients, especially for CRC patients withschistosomiasis.MethodsThree hundred fifty-one CRC tumors were evaluated for density of CD4 + , CD8 + T cells and CRP in intratumoral and stromal compartments by immunohistochemical using tissue microarray.ResultsThere were no association between TILs and CRP andschistosomiasis. Multivariate analysis identified stromal CD4 (sCD4) (p= 0.038), intratumoral CD8 (iCD8) (p= 0.003),schistosomiasis(p= 0.045) as independent prognostic factors for overall survival (OS) in the whole cohort; and sCD4 (p= 0.006) and iCD8 (p= 0.020) were independent prognostic factors for OS in the NSCRC and SCRC set, respectively. Besides, we found that there were no differences of TILs and CRP, which were distributed in different areas of tumor tissue, between CRC patients with and withoutschistosomiasis.ConclusionThe results remind us that different subtypes of TILs have distinguished biological behavior and prognosis value in the immune microenvironment of NSCRC and SCRC patients. Meanwhile, the findings require us to stratify patients withschistosomiasisand this might facilitate patient counseling and management.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12876-023-02834-z.