Palliative treatment in "peri"-pancreatic carcinoma: stenting or surgical therapy?

Mostly, patients with peri-pancreatic cancer (including pancreatic, ampullary and distal bile duct tumors) are diagnosed in a stage in which curative resection is not possible. The median survival rate of patients with non resectable peri-pancreatic cancer varies between 6 and 12 months. During this period palliative treatment is necessary, which should focus on major symptoms as obstructive jaundice, duodenal obstruction and pain. Controversy exists about how to provide optimal palliative treatment. Both surgical and non surgical palliative procedures relief obstructive jaundice. From early retrospective and prospective randomized studies it is known that in the early phase after treatment, more complications are found after surgical palliation, whereas in the late phase more complications are seen after endoscopic palliation. Because more recent studies clearly showed improved results after surgical palliation, current recommendations probably should be that patients with a suspected poor short-term survival (< 6 months) should be offered non surgical palliative therapy and those with a longer life expectancy may best be treated with bypass surgery. Unfortunately, valid criteria for estimating the remaining survival time are not available, except for the presence of metastases. The use of a prognostic score chart might assist in estimating the prognosis. Literature does not give sufficient information to make a well deliberated (evidence based) selection between the different types of surgical bypasses, but a choledochojejunostomy is generally preferred. After stenting, a correlation is found between survival and the development of duodenal obstruction, and between 9% and 21% of the patients who underwent a surgical biliary bypass without a prophylactic gastric bypass, will develop gastric outlet obstruction. Therefore, in patients with a relatively good prognosis it is recommended to perform routinely a double--biliary and gastric--bypass. Pain is a frequent symptom and is related with poor survival. Pain management aside from pain medication can be performed by means of a celiac plexus blockade or a thorascopic splanchnicectomy, and also radiotherapy seems to have a positive result on pain.