Delay to Adjuvant Chemotherapy: Survival and Recurrence in Patients of Rectal Cancer Treated with Neo-adjuvant Chemoradiotherapy and Surgery.

Purpose: This aim of the study is to evaluate the survival function and hazard risks of delayed adjuvant chemotherapy (ChT) to distant recurrence risk in patients with non-metastatic rectal cancer treated with neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy (CRT) and surgery.

Methods: A single tertiary hospital retrospective cohort study of a duration of 5 years between January 2012 and December 2016 was performed. As no previous study shown a temporal relationship of delay to adjuvant/systemic ChT leading to increased risk of metastatic disease, we compared between our proposed cut-off with the median and mean value determined by our dataset.