The standard treatment for locally advanced rectal cancer is neoadjuvant chemoradiation followed by radical proctectomy with total mesorectal excision. A significant percentage of patients exhibit a pathological complete response with associated survival benefit. The management of patients who exhibit a complete clinical response after neoadjuvant chemoradiation, and could potentially avoid maj...

There has been a high local recurrence rate in rectal cancer. Besides improvements in surgical techniques, both neoadjuvant short-course radiotherapy and long-course chemoradiation improve oncological results. Approximately 40-60% of rectal cancer patients treated with neoadjuvant chemoradiation achieve some degree of pathologic response. However, there is no effective method of predicting whic...

BACKGROUND Concurrent chemoradiation is becoming an increasingly popular treatment for patients with locally advanced head and neck cancer. The full extent of treatment related complications has not been completely documented in the literature. METHODS We present the case of a patient treated with definitive intensity modulated radiation therapy and concurrent carboplatin and fluorouracil for...

We read with great interest the results of the LAP07 study comparing capecitabine-based chemoradiation with gemcitabine-based therapy for non-progressive locally advanced pancreatic cancer (LAPC), following four months of gemcitabine-based therapy. The results, consistent with previous data, showed that standard chemoradiation improves local control (LC) but not overall survival. In this brief ...

CONTEXT Among patients with locally advanced metastatic pancreatic adenocarcinoma, gemcitabine has been shown to improve outcomes compared with fluorouracil. OBJECTIVE To determine if the addition of gemcitabine to adjuvant fluorouracil chemoradiation (chemotherapy plus radiation) improves survival for patients with resected pancreatic adenocarcinoma. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS Rando...

BACKGROUND Anal cancer remains common among human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) patients. Chemoradiation has had mixed results. We evaluated outcome differences by HIV status. METHODS We retrospectively analyzed 14 HIV+ and 72 HIV- anal cancer patients (2000 to 2013). Outcomes included chemoradiation tolerance, recurrence, and survival. RESULTS HIV+ patients were more often male (100% vs 38%...

Para-aortic lymph node recurrence is a rare type of metastasis from colorectal cancer, and no treatment has yet been established. Here, we report on a case of isolated para-aortic lymph node metastasis from rectosigmoid cancer that showed complete response to chemoradiation therapy with capecitabine/oxaliplatin plus bevacizumab. A 58-year-old woman underwent high anterior resection for rectosig...

BACKGROUND Neoadjuvant chemoradiation before surgery is an emerging treatment modality for pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC). However, analysis of prognostic factors is limited for patients with PDAC treated with neoadjuvant chemoradiation and pancreaticoduodenectomy (PD). METHODS The study population was comprised of 240 consecutive patients with PDAC who received neoadjuvant chemoradi...

Controversy remains regarding whether preoperative chemoradiation protocol should be applied uniformly to all rectal cancer patients regardless of tumor height. This pooled analysis was designed to evaluate whether preoperative chemoradiation can be safely omitted in higher rectal cancer.An international consortium of 7 institutions was established. A review of the database that was collected f...

The aim of this study was to evaluate the survival of 395 previously untreated cervical cancer patients with at least one high risk factor following concurrent chemoradiation and to assess the toxicities. Two different chemotherapy regimens were used for concurrent chemoradiation. In the patients with squamous cell carcinoma, 100 mg/m2 of cisplatin was infused intravenously, followed immediatel...