[Medical treatment of digestive neuroendocrine tumours]

Surgery is the only therapy able to cure patients with digestive neuroendocrine tumor. However, due to the presence of diffuse metastases, radical surgery is often not feasible. In these cases, medical treatment plays a critical role, because of its ability to control symptoms in functioning tumors and to inhibit tumor growth. Different therapeutic approaches, such as chemotherapy, hepatic artery chemoembolization and targeted radio-nuclide therapy can be used alone or combined to the biologic treatment with somatostatin analogues and interferon. However, an accurate staging by imaging procedures plus a histological, immunohistochemical and biomolecular examination must be performed before planning an optimal medical treatment.