Radiotherapy and concurrent radiochemotherapy for rectal cancer.

Adjuvant radiotherapy with or without chemotherapy has been used widely in an attempt to improve outcome in rectal cancer. For locally advanced disease, postoperative radiochemotherapy significantly improved both local control and overall survival when compared with surgery alone or surgery plus irradiation. This prompted a National Cancer Institute Consensus Conference in the United States in 1990 to recommend postoperative radiochemotherapy for patients with TNM stage II and III rectal cancer as standard treatment. In Europe, several randomized studies tested preoperative radiotherapy in comparison to surgery alone and showed lower local failure rates. A recent meta-analysis concluded that the combination of preoperative radiotherapy and surgery, as compared with surgery alone, significantly improves local control and overall survival. These results are, however, challenged by more recent reports of extraordinarily low local failure rates following improved surgical techniques, including total mesorectal excision. Evidently, the current monolithic approaches to either apply the same schedule of postoperative radiochemotherapy to all patients with stage II/III rectal cancer or to give preoperative intensive short-course radiation according to the Swedish concept for all patients with resectable rectal cancer irrespective of tumor stage and treatment goal (e.g. sphincter preservation), need to be questioned.