Adjuvant or neoadjuvant therapy for pancreatic carcinoma?

Whipple's resection for pancreatic cancer is an inadequate procedure and should be regarded as a lumpectomy. Adjuvant treatment should be directed towards local regional and liver recurrences. In the USA, adjuvant treatment after curative Whipple resection is standard procedure, based upon results of the GITSG study in which postoperative radiotherapy and 5-FU treatment resulted in significantly better survival in 23 patients. Preliminary results of our study in Rotterdam, however, do not seem to confirm these data. In this study, 218 patients were randomly assigned to surgery only or for 40-Gy radiotherapy and 4 weeks 5-FU treatment. Another option is neoadjuvant treatment which has theoretic advantages. A number of nonrandomized studies seem to indicate that radiotherapy and 5-FU treatment may have benefit in pancreatic cancer in a neoadjuvant treatment form. It is not clear which direction to take. Randomized studies are necessary to study the effect of neoadjuvant treatment with radiotherapy and 5-FU or with regional perfusion of the pancreatic area.