Do All Stage IA Pancreatic Cancer Patients Need Adjuvant Chemotherapy?

National guidelines recommend adjuvant chemotherapy (AC) following resection for all stages of pancreatic cancer (PDAC), but the benefit of AC in Stage IA disease remains unclear. The objective of this study was to identify a subgroup of patients with Stage IA PDAC that could possibly forego AC.

The National Cancer Database (NCDB) was queried to identify all patients with Stage IA PDAC diagnosed from 2010 to 2021. Patients who received AC were compared to those who did not. Multivariable analysis was conducted to identify risk factors associated with overall survival (OS).

There were 1421 patients eligible for analysis. On multivariable analysis, we found nine factors associated with worse overall OS: advanced age (p = 0.0414), lower median income (p = 0.0148), Medicare (p = 0.0180), higher-grade tumor histology (p = 0.0182), LVI (p = 0.0028), positive surgical margins (p = 0.0027), examination of fewer than 12 lymph nodes (p = 0.0395), and a length of stay greater than 7 days (p < 0.0001). OS was negatively correlated with an increased number of risk factors. Improved OS was observed following AC in patients with three (∆OS = +54 months; p = 0.0016) or four or more risk factors (∆OS = +11.4 months; p = 0.0250). However, patients with fewer than three risk factors did not experience improvement in OS following AC.

AC does not appear to benefit Stage IA PDAC patients with fewer than three risk factors indicating that it may be safe to omit AC in these individuals.