Can the prognosis of colorectal cancer be improved by surgery?

Surgical resection is the only curative treatment modality for colorectal cancer limited locally. Evidence for the kind of resection procedure that is effective for improving prognosis is insufficient. Prognosis improvement is expected with the no-touch isolation technique (NTIT), making it the most important resection procedure. We are conducting a multicenter randomized controlled trial (RCT) to confirm the efficacy of NTIT in patients with colorectal cancer. The present review serves as a preface to our trial, as it focuses on basic and clinical studies that support the efficacy of NTIT. The detection ratios of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) of peripheral blood indicate the progress and prognosis of colorectal cancer. In a rabbit liver tumor model, metastases increased after surgical manipulation. Also, CTCs increased during the radical excision of colorectal cancer. However, NTIT decreased the detection of CTCs of intraoperative portal vein blood in patients with colorectal cancer. Although these aforementioned results support the use of NTIT, a previous controlled prospective trial was not able to confirm the clinical benefit of NTIT, as it had an insufficient sample size and many patients were lost to follow-up. Therefore, we initiated a large-scale high-quality RCT to confirm the efficacy of NTIT for colorectal cancer.