Early rectal cancer: local excision or radical surgery?

Sphincter preservation, disease control, and long-term survival are the main goals in the treatment of rectal cancer. Although transanal local excision is attractive because it is a sphincter sparing procedure, some contradictory data exist in the literature about its ability to locally control disease and provide overall survival comparable with radical procedures, even for patients with early stage tumor.

To compare transanal local excision and radical surgery treatment results based on the appropriate data in literature.

We reviewed the literature to identify the current recurrence and survival rates of both techniques as well as the salvage surgery success. A PubMed search of the last 10 years was performed, and a total of 10 nonrandomized studies were identified; only 1 study was prospective, 5 were comparative, and 5 were case reports.

Five-year overall survival rate varied from 69% to 83% in the local excision group versus 82% to 90% for the radical excision group. Local recurrence rates ranged from 9% to 20% for local excision and from 2% to 9% for radical surgery. Systemic recurrence rates ranged from 6% to 21% for local excision and from 2% to 9% for radical surgery.

Radical surgery is the more definitive cancer treatment; however, it does not eliminate local excision as a reasonable choice for many patients, who will have lesser procedure-related morbidity and will accept an increased risk of tumor recurrence, a prolonged period of postoperative cancer surveillance, and a decreased success rate by salvage surgery.