Randomized controlled trial of postoperative radiotherapy and short-term time-scheduled 5-fluorouracil against surgery alone in the treatment of Dukes B and C rectal cancer

Abstract

The 1-month postoperative combination regimen improved treatment results in patients with Dukes B and C rectal cancer, in terms of local recurrence rate, recurrence-free survival and overall survival, without serious side-effects.

The Postoperative Adjuvant Radiation Therapy and Radiochemotherapy for UICC Stage II and III Rectal Cancer A Retrospective Analysis

“…The acute and late toxicity on our series correlates with the findings from other series using appropriate radiotherapy techniques [28,36,49,51].…”

“…The overall 5-year survival (63%) and disease-free survival (53%) for the 68 patients treated with radiochemotherapy in our series are slightly lower than that reported from randomized trials recently [36,49,51]. The previous mentioned possible negative patient selection in our series, due to the nonstandardized criteria for adjuvant treatment during this period, might be a reason for this.…”

“…With the exception that in the early years, higher radiation doses were used for high-risk tumors (lymphatic invasion, R1-resection), quality of treatment is comparable with that of recent published randomized trials using adjuvant radiotherapy [2] or radiochemotherapy [36,49,51].…”

“…These "high-risk" tumors have been in the past the subject of randomized trials using preoperative or postoperative radiotherapy or radiochemotherapy [2,3,15,17,18,24,34,46,47,49,50,51]. The randomized Gastrointestinal Tumor Study Group (GITSG)-trial first demonstrated a benefit in relapsefree survival after postoperative combined radiochemotherapy over surgery [17].…”

Prognostic Value of Tumor Response to Neoadjuvant Therapy in Rectal Carcinoma

“…The prognosis of LARC has been improved considerably in recent years with the introduction of total mesorectal excision, 9 adjuvant therapy, 13,14 and the addition of multimodal neoadjuvant treatment. Some studies have demonstrated that preoperative radiation with or without chemotherapy in LARC improved local control [15][16][17] and survival rate 15,18 compared with surgery alone.…”