[Progress in diagnosis and treatment of rectal neuroendocrine neoplasms]

Neuroendocrine neoplasms (NENs) are relatively rare heterogeneous tumors that originate from peptidergic neurons and neuroendocrine cells and have been referred to as "carcinoids" in the past. Although this type of tumor had been previously considered to be indolent tumor with a low degree of malignancy, with the development of medicine and clinical study, researchers found that NENs had the potential to metastasize. They can occur in any part of the body where neuroendocrine cells are distributed and gastro-entero-pancreatic neuroendocrine neoplasms (GEP-NENs) are the most common type of NENs.Due to the improvement of techniques such as endoscopy and imaging, the incidence of rectal neuroendocrine tumors(R-NENs) and the number of related clinical researches have both increased significantly in recent years. Although researches in Chinese and foreign medical centers are mostly retrospective studies of small samples and the efficacies of different treatment methods are still under debating and lack of sufficient medical evidence to support, the diagnosis and treatment of this disease is gradually becoming standardized according to the proposal of corresponding guidelines. The recent advances in the epidemiology, diagnosis and treatment of rectal neuroendocrine neoplasms are reviewed in this paper.