Rectal Cancer: Organ preservation and neoadjuvant treatment escalation

xlomafota13 shared this article with you from Inoreader Rectal Cancer: Organ preservation and neoadjuvant treatment escalation Via Association française pour l'étude du cancer Bull Cancer. 2021 Nov 18:S0007-4551(21)00391-X. doi: 10.1016/j.bulcan.2021.09.007. Online ahead of print. ABSTRACT Standard treatment consisting of chemoradiotherapy followed by radical surgery with total mesorectal excision, results in good oncologic local control but high morbidity and poor functional results. Since chemoradiotherapy results in 15% pathological complete response, even reaching up to 30% in case of association with neoadjuvant chemotherapy, radical surgery has been recently debated for good responders. Therefore, a de-escalation strategy, by omitting radical surgery in good responders, has recently been developed with two different options: a watch and wait strategy, requiring an accurate clinical and radiological definition of complete response and a local excision strategy including patients with sub-complete response. Ongoing trials focus on response optimization by chemotherapy intensification or radiotherapy dose escalation. However, many questions are still to be answered regarding definition of complete response, follow-up strategy, morbidity of salvage surgery in case of recurrence as well as long-term oncological and functionnal results. PMID:34802716 | DOI:10.1016/j.bulcan.2021.09.007 View on the web Inoreader. Take back control of your news feed. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook.