Radiochemotherapy in the management of pancreatic cancer--part I: neoadjuvant treatment.

In pancreatic cancer, complete resection offers the only hope of cure, but results of surgery alone are suboptimal. Many studies have been conducted in which the treatment regimen consists of surgery in combination with radiation and chemotherapy to improve local control and outcome. Neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy is a fairly recent approach that appears to be feasible in resectable and locally advanced pancreatic cancer. In resectable tumors, chemoradiation therapy has been shown to be at least as effective in a neoadjuvant setting as in an adjuvant setting. Neoadjuvant therapy offers a few theoretical advantages: (1) beginning the multimodality treatment with chemoradiation therapy increases the chance that more patients will receive all of its components; (2) preoperative chemoradiation therapy provides an observation period to exclude from surgical resection those patients with rapidly progressive disease; and (3) in locally advanced tumors, it provides the opportunity for downstaging and infrequently allows patients to undergo resection. To evaluate the scope and applicability of neoadjuvant treatment, a number of areas need to be addressed. First, the definition of locally advanced disease needs to be more adequately standardized because the resectability definition sometimes varies among surgeons. In addition, because imaging examinations may underestimate the effectiveness of preoperative chemoradiation therapy, some researchers have tried to evaluate treatment response via a pathological examination of the tumor specimen; however, complete pathological response appears to be rare. Finally, more efficient novel neoadjuvant approaches are required to address the high metastatic potential of pancreatic cancer. These areas are discussed in depth.