Surgery for Colorectal Cancer - Trends, Developments, and Future Perspectives

Although colorectal surgery is long established as the mainstay treatment for colon cancer, certain topics regarding technical fine-tuning to increase postsurgical recurrence-free survival have remained a matter of debate throughout the past years. These include complete mesocolic excision (CME), treatment strategies for metastatic disease, significance of hyperthermic intraperitoneal chemotherapy (HIPEC), and surgical techniques for the treatment of colorectal cancer recurrence. In addition, new surgical techniques have been introduced in oncologic colorectal surgery, and their potential to provide sufficiently radical resection has yet to be proven.

A structured review of the literature was performed to identify the current state of the art with regard to the mentioned key issues in colorectal surgery.

This article provides a comprehensive review of the current literature addressing the above-mentioned current challenges in colorectal surgery. The focus lies on the impact of CME and, in relation to this, on lymph node dissection, as well as on treatment of metastatic disease including peritoneal spread, and finally on the treatment of recurrent disease.

Uniformly, the current literature reveals that surgery aiming at complete malignancy elimination within multimodal treatment approaches represents the fundamental quantum leap for the achievement of long-term tumor-free survival.