Development and controversies of adjuvant therapy for pancreatic cancer.

BACKGROUND

Pancreatic cancer is an aggressive malignancy with a dismal prognosis. Radical surgery provides the only chance for a cure with a 5-year survival rate of 7%-25%. An effective adjuvant therapy is urgently needed to improve the surgical outcome. This review describes the current status of adjuvant therapy for pancreatic cancer, and highlights its controversies.

DATA SOURCES

A Medline database search was performed to identify relevant articles using the keywords "pancreatic neoplasm", and "adjuvant therapy". Additional papers were identified by a manual search of the references from the key articles.

RESULTS

Eight prospective randomized controlled trials (RCTs) on the use of adjuvant chemotherapy and chemoradiation for pancreatic cancer could be identified. The results for adjuvant regimens based on systemic 5-fluorouracil with or without external radiotherapy were conflicting. The recent two RCTs on gemcitabine based regimen gave promising results.

CONCLUSIONS

Based on the available data, no standard adjuvant therapy for pancreatic cancer can be established yet. The best adjuvant regimen remains to be determined in large-scale RCTs. Future trials should use a gemcitabine based regimen.