Surgery versus radiochemotherapy for resectable locally invasive pancreatic cancer: final results of a randomized multi-institutional trial.

Purpose: Although the outcome of surgery for locally advanced pancreatic cancer remains poor, it is improving, with 5-year survival up to about 10% in Japan. The preliminary results of our multi-institutional randomized controlled trial revealed better survival after surgery than after radiochemotherapy. We report the final results of this study after 5 years of follow-up.

A randomized multicenter trial comparing resection and radiochemotherapy for resectable locally invasive pancreatic cancer.

Background: Though the outcome of resection for locally invasive pancreatic cancer is still poor, it has gradually improved in Japan, and the 5-year survival is now about 10%. However, the advantage of resection over radiochemotherapy has not yet been confirmed by a randomized trial. We conducted this study to compare surgical resection alone versus radiochemotherapy without resection for locally invasive pancreatic cancer using a multicenter randomized design.