[Combination therapy in oncology (multimodal treatment) in pancreatic tumors]

The majority of patients with pancreatic cancer have systemic disease already at diagnosis, and nearly all patients will develop recurrence following radical resection. Thus, surgical treatment alone is insufficient. The paper focuses on adjuvant multimodal treatment and reviews the current status of pre- and postoperative chemoradiation, intraoperative radiotherapy (IORT), adjuvant chemotherapy, and regional infusion therapy. Studies in this area are hampered by often being non-randomized and with too few patients included. Overall there presently is no adjuvant multimodal treatment which can be suggested for routine use. However, two ongoing prospective randomized studies (ESPAC-1 and an EORTC study) will have enough statistical power to give reliable information on the topic. It is hoped that these and other studies will form the basis for further proper clinical trials on multimodal treatment in pancreatic cancer with the aim at long last to improve the extremely poor survival in these patients.