Dec 18, 2020
Treatment approach has potential disease-free survival advantage
Patients with locally advanced rectal cancer treated with total neoadjuvant therapy followed by surgery had a higher chance of achieving a pathologic complete response than those treated with standard therapy involving concurrent chemotherapy followed by surgery and adjuvant chemotherapy, a meta-analysis of 7 trials involving more than 2,400 patients revealed.
The pooled prevalence of pathologic complete response (PCR) was 29.9% in the total neoadjuvant therapy (TNT) patients and 14.9% in the standard treatment group.
Surgical outcomes, including rates of sphincter-preserving surgery and ileostomy, did not differ significantly between the two treatment groups, and just 3 studies included data on disease-free survival while none included data on overall survival.