Combo Therapy Improves Pancreatic Surgery Outcome

SATURDAY, Jan. 20 (HealthDay News) -- Treatment with radiation and chemotherapy after surgery to remove invasive pancreatic cancer may improve overall patient survival rates, a Mayo Clinic Cancer Center study finds.

Researchers examined the records of 454 patients who had surgery with negative margins (some healthy tissue cut out around the cancerous cells) to remove pancreatic adenocarcinoma.

The study did not include patients who had metastatic cancer, tumors that could not be removed, tumors that were not entirely removed (positive surgical margins), or slow-growing tumors.

Of the 454 patients in the study, more than half (274) received concurrent radiation and chemotherapy after their surgery. Of those patients, 50 percent survived two years, and 28 percent survived at least five years.

Patients who did not receive any additional treatment after surgery had survival rates of 39 percent at two years and 17 percent at five years.

"While long-term outcomes with pancreatic cancer are generally poor, our findings show that including both chemotherapy and radiation following surgery may significantly improve patient survival rates," study lead author Dr. Michele Corsini, a radiation oncology resident, said in a prepared statement.

The findings were expected to be presented Saturday at the Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium, in Orlando, Fla.

A German study published this week concluded that using chemotherapy after surgical removal of a pancreatic tumor may help extend disease-free survival.

The study found that patients who took the chemotherapy drug gemcitabine following pancreatic cancer surgery lived disease-free an average of six months longer than those who had only the surgery. Their study was published in the Jan. 17 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.