[Combined chemotherapy with oral leucovorin (LV) + tegafur/uracil (UFT) and hepatic arterial infusion (HAI) therapy for liver metastasis of colorectal cancer].

The liver is the most frequent metastatic site from colorectal cancer, and the control of liver metastasis is an important issue in the treatment of progressive colorectal cancer. Hepatic arterial infusion (HAI) therapy can achieve a high drug concentration in the liver and relatively low level in the systemic circulation because of the first pass effect of the drug metabolism. With the high response rate, several reports have failed to show a significant survival benefit of HAI monotherapy, partially due to its inability to control extrahepatic metastasis. In this report, we used oral tegafur/uracil (UFT) and Leucovorin (LV) combined with HAI of 5-FU for four patients with liver metastasis of colorectal carcinoma. One of two patients with unresectable multiple hepatic metastases could undergo resectional surgery after 5 courses of this therapy. Two other cases in an adjuvant setting have been surviving free of tumors. In this series, adverse effects of this therapy were acceptable, including one case of grade 3 thrombocytopenia. The benefit of this combined therapy for survival in a case of liver metastasis from CRC remains to be evaluated. We are planning phase I and II clinical studies to evaluate the efficiency and feasibility of this combination therapy.