HIPEC in controversial digestive tumors

Local-regional and peritoneal metastases still develop despite improvements in surgical techniques. Intraperitoneal chemotherapy has been proved to be effective in reducing the rate of local-regional and peritoneal metastases in many malignancies. There is adequate evidence that intraperitoneal perioperative chemotherapy after aggressive resection of locally advanced tumors of the digestive system may be helpful in decreasing the rate of local-regional and peritoneal metastases. Prospective trials and meta-analyses have shown that patients with locally advanced gastric or colorectal carcinomas are offered significant survival benefit and develop reduced number of local-regional metastases with surgery combined with perioperative intraperitoneal chemotherapy. In pancreatic cancer the preliminary results have shown that these patients do not develop local-regional recurrences with R0 resection in combination with hyperthermic intraoperative intraperitoneal chemotherapy (HIPEC). Further studies are required to document these findings.